Two Words, One Answer.
Eric Bogosian
 Talk Radio Eric Bogosian Ellen Greene Oliver Stone Alec Baldwin 8x10 Photo $6.99 High quality photo makes a welcome addition to your collection. Looks great on a media wall.  Eric Bogosian: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee $26.95 I loved the product. I've watched it several times and each time is funnier than the last one. I'd like to see more of his videos. They make the books understandable for content and how he says things.  Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll $13.95 This classic Eric Bogosian script is a series of monologues that are visceral, funny, shocking, insightful, touching and high-energy. This could be performed as a one-man-show or with a series of actors. I highly recommend this very fine piece of American theatre.  Perforated Heart: A Novel $25.00 Richard Morris is a writer who prides himself deeply in his own personal honesty. Like Hemingway he believes that his job as a writer is to write one true sentence after another. Like Norman Mailer he believes that he must guide himself toward madness, to glimpse into the abyss and then write about what he sees resident there. Unfortunately, Norman Mailer chose to become a social clown existentially acting-up to promote his books and both writers may have been better served to understand Hemingway's engagement more deeply. As a young man Morris devotes his life to becoming immersed into the hippie life of New York City. He catches glimpses of the Andy Warhol crowd of the 70's and chases endlessly after beautiful, young models. He suffers for his art and I give him great credit for this: but every respectable literary novelist pays his or her dues. Morris takes large quantities of alcohol and diverse street drugs in this quest for pure, artistic honesty. But how honest is the writing of someone on drugs and alcohol? We love Fitzgerald's novels despite his alcoholism for the pure, sober, lyric clarity of his work in spite of it. Morris name-drops a card catalogue of novelists: Joyce, Mailer, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, Gaddis, Roth and TC Boyle. But Morris really doesn't add much value in his narrative about them beyond the names. As an older man in his 50's Morris comes to grip with his mortality after recovering from a heart attack much in the same way as Yambo recovers from a stroke in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco. Morris gains wealth and seeks more fame after his latest novel is initially received lukewarmly by critics and the public. Morris performs radically unethical acts, which he writes off cavalierly as honesty. The women of his life are beautiful, but shallow creatures, ultimately fixated like Morris on wealth, fame and epic self-interest. Essentially, Richard Morris is a narcissist and is the sun in his urban solar system. It's credible to view Morris as the personification of New York City. No narrative voice is so singularly vain as the first-person singular. As a result despite his vast social network and audience, he remains totally alone with far fewer days ahead than behind him and unloved with death physically attacking his heart. The writing here is engaging but could have been better served with closer editing as Bogosian seeks to shock us with the gritty reality of his recognitions and articulated truth. Richard Morris does not yet seem fully to recognize that cruel and brutal honesty often serves no useful purpose except to hurt and alienate other people. Vastly more important than his evangelism of cruel honesty is good faith and real love, which are more central to artistic integrity than the vanity of subjective honesty. Does the successful writer have a duty to a worthy protg? Richard Morris has no duty to anyone, except himself. I understand that he wants the protg to suffer for his art as the mature artist has done in his youth within the crucible of urban hardship. Richard Morris is essentially compelled to dwell in the hell of his own self-indulgence. He is incapable of any semblance of humanity, except in the treatment of his family, and betrays every soul whom he befriends. Isn't the real job of great writers to inspire humanity? Morris serves to make the world more harsh, bitter and cruel by having focused his artistic integrity upon the easily discerned ugliness of life in the name of brutal honesty. Let's be honest: why can't Morris discern the real beauty of life? Perhaps, his blindness to real, honest beauty is the greatest tragic flaw of Morris. |
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