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Kratos would totally kick Dante's a**.

Oh please....Dante would totally unload on Kratos with Ebony and Ivory before finishing him off with Rebellion or Nevan.

Wait...wrong Dante...

I haven't shut up in 10 years, you think I'm going to start now? Hehe.. you're funny!
rofl heart

I had to do a double take just now, to make sure it was you and not me who posted that, cause I'm sure that I've said pretty much exactly that at least once every day since it came out on video to a customer or co-worker. Come to the coast and we'll plot the downfall of western civilization together.

The interesting thing about Palahniuk is his enduring appeal. His writing has- since the beginning of his career- been regarded as being the purest expression of the (male) Generation X experience rivaled only by Vancouver based Douglas Copeland (who is credited with naming Generation X), and yet he continues to draw a large audience of young adults well into Generation Y.

I got to see him at a book reading in Calgary back in 2005 on his tour for Haunted which brought out a brilliantly eclectic crowd. Rockwell in Choke is an eerily perfect portrayal of Palahniuk himself which is appropriate given that Choke was his way of working through the death of his mother, and hilarious given that Palahniuk is gay.

When I actually got up to meet him, all of my pressing questions had been previously answered by the preceding Q&A session so I asked him who his favorite superhero was, to which he responded "Green Lantern."

He probably meant Hal, but a few minutes later when I reached the door of the bookstore, I burst out laughing because all I could think of was the infamous girlfriend in the refrigerator incident and how perfectly it matched the dismemberment motif in Haunted.

To be fair, we are talking Palahniuk. Have you ever considered that I could be your alternate personality, or vice-versa?

Palahniuk's books before Lullaby all had running themes that appeal to a growing number of people. Anyone who's read or seen Fight Club knows what I'm talking about. After that, he's had a more horror-driven approach, which is also massively appealing. It's his narratives (along with the things I've just brought up, to be honest) that tend to get me.

You saw him on the Haunted tour? Did he read Guts? Guts is definitely one of my favorite things he's ever written, if only because no movie, television show, comic book or piece of writing had ever brought me that close to vomiting beforehand, or since. It goes a ways to showing just how powerful the written word is. Stuff like Hostel can't hold a torch to the images that your own mind can come up with sometimes.

The Whedonite's Dilemma



rofl

I have, but at this point I'd be more likely to blame Grant Morrison, Umberto Ecco, or Jorge Luis Borges. Stranger things have happened in my adult life.



He said he originally intended to do Hot Potting or whatever the one about the dog in Alaska was, but decided he ought to do Guts because it was his first tour in Canada. I'm not sure how much you know about the Haunted tour, but he said that he brought along these plastic severed limbs to give out because people used to ask him for signatures on their bodies, but he started to notice that they'd come back on the next tour with the signatures tattooed onto them.

By the time he got to town I'd already finished Haunted thankfully, but Guts really did get to me, which apparently is something that actually happened to one of his college friends. I had a hard time picking the book up again after I finished Guts, but I felt like the rest of the book was much easier to get through and while it was much more horror than zeitgeist, I think there was a lot of important commentary in there. I haven't read it since 2005, but the stories about the police dolls and the feminist meeting were powerful stuff.

I want to see eet. crying