Tampa the book

Being the edgy and controversial dude I am, I decided to get ahead of the bandwagon and read Tampa by Alissa Nutting.  Before I go on and tell you any details about it I have to get two things out of the way: One, I hate fiction.  DEPLORE it.  I enjoy sharp dialogue and well written, clever passages that make me laugh out loud with how clever they are.  Raymond Chandler is the standard that I hold all fiction to.  Because this tittilation happens so few and far between (but does happen)I find it very discouraging to read any fiction, and I generally regard it as an almost assured waste of my time. 

Second thing is, I primarily wanted to read this book for the sex scenes, to see if a 26 year old "hot" schoolteacher having sex with a 14 year old borderline (giving that one to Alissa, hmm? - Ed) prepubescent boy could be erotic and turn me on.  Turns out she really can't, or maybe she didn't want to, in which case she totally dropped the ball on that one.  This is just the first of a wave of 50-Shades-of-Grey-with-a-Shamalan-twist clones that printing presses and electronic publishing software will churn out for our generation.  Something to look forward to. 

To her credit she does lift some ideas from American Psycho, she does not steal enough to make her novel entertaining, and does attempt to put us in to the mind of a beautiful 26 year old psychopathic pedophile.  She masturbates while thinking a lot about boys, which I'm sure most people have done, but then takes the next logical step and plans her entire life and career around molesting boys.    Everyone else around her are just inconvenient tools whom she is incapable of having any feelings for.  Maybe there are mental illnesses that make people that way.  As Bret Easton Ellis showed us, reading about people with mental illnesses is pretty fascinating because they have bizarre, very particular personality qualities that usually make them interesting to read about, such as WesleyWillis or Phineas Gage.  However, Alissa decided to pick the most excruciatingly boring of psychopathologies, and proceed to write almost two hundred and fifty pages about her. 

If you enjoy similes that involve the words like and as you should definitely read Tampa. 

I'm going to tell you another reason you should read the book:  there is an idea in it that is fantastic.  Part way through the book she wants to get rid of the boy she had spent the first half of the book seducing.  She goes on to seduce another boy, but the implications of her reasoning why she loses feelings for the first kid is interesting.  She finds him unpleasant to be around, he becomes less intimate and rougher and emotionally distant.  All of these are because of, the result of, the ideas she gives to him and the experiences she subjects him to.  She at no point dwells on this, that she has made him in to a person she is incapable of tolerating, the same way she regards her husband and possibly also other adult men.  I think she is talking about male female relationships in general.  When we are young to the dating scene the first few people we have intimate contact with form a very lasting impression.  It is very easy for people to become frigid because of early relationships when sex was not good, and have poor future relationships, spreading that negativity to others who may have been impressionable or new to the experience.  We are capable of shaping our future experience and be willing to make another attempt by keeping an open mind, instead of perpetuating an endless cycle of misdirected revenge or confusion of our own animalistic tendencies. 

In the end, or at no point whatsoever do we find out anything about the main pretty lady person's past because the writer thought it was probably a bad idea to give them any sort of empathy, explanation her behavior or anything that would accidentally develop her "character". 

Century of the Self and Simulacrum

In my last entry I discussed how Adam Curtis' observations in his insightful documentary series Century of the Self could be used to interpret political situations throughout the 2010's in America, and how a world was created where the average person's priorities were misdirected based on irrational, unconscious emotions centred around consumerism.  This world is promoted and reiterated by Big Media to maintain a passive population.  As it turns out, the basis of these theories are based on classic theory of social analysis, deep thinker and sociologist turned philosopher Jean Baudrillard.  Writing on the relationship between people and objects in the late 60's, consumerism in 1970 and politics and culture throughout the rest of his career, Baudrillard's most famous work was a book in 1981, Simulations and Simulacra, writings that served as inspiration for the Matrix movies.

Humans relationships to objects have changed as the roles and functions of objects have evolved alongside us, serving as limbs, sensory objects, or changing how we in turn interact with a third object.  Objects originally bought for a primary function begin to serve a secondary function, and suddenly the secondary qualities becomes the object's primary purpose.  Baudrillard uses the example of a refrigerator, where all old fridges used to be white, once they introduced fridges in different colors, suddenly you must select a fridge based on the color scheme of the rest of the kitchen.  The fridge becomes an accessory to the kitchen's ensemble, and by proximity becomes a statement made by the people who live there.  A person can express themselves by the arrangement and relative colors mixing about the kitchen. 

This analysis continues in The Consumer Society and Simulations, where personal expression is solely done through the purchasing of items in the full spectrum of imagination, and this is but one component of the Simulacrum, where we live in a "hyperreality" where mass production and consumption has created a fakeness or series of reproducible clones.  This ubiquity of copies of objects changes the way we think about objects, believing in the reproducibility of everything and so attributing a disposability and temporariness of everything around us.  A striking example he uses is Disneyland, a hyperreal fantasy that we (as a society) not only use to escape the "reality" that normally surrounds us for a while, but also reaffirms in our minds that the reality we normally inhabit is not a simulation.  This conviction that we are living in a more "real" reality is what allows us to continue living in it, and not questioning why the things around us have to be the way they are.

Century of the Self examines Bernays marketing techniques, but otherwise paints a similar picture where social order is based around consumerism, and where objects are given relationships to powerful emotional symbols based on self-expression.  And if you keep stimulating that irrational self you can maintain the relations of power and control the animalistic forces by keeping them engaged.  Bernays pioneered the technique of marketing research, meeting with volunteers and encouraging them to pretend they are consumer products and act out their relationships with the products.   Similarly, political marketers encouraged people to talk about policies and how they felt about them, encouraging them to act out these relationships as well.  This was the creation of the simulacrum that surrounds us presently. 

Not only are people engaged in this hyperreality, they are completely immersed in a reality created by the forces of media, big business and government.  Advertisement campaigns create emotional attachment by conveying unspoken ideas, encouraging self expression and activity through the purchase of products.  Curtis uses the example of the World's Fair, creating a Disneyland-esque atmosphere, while surrounding the visitor with the icons of consumption and self-expression.