Trainspotting

[paulpablo]

Trainspotting 2 is about to come out.  If you haven't heard of trainspotting it's a Scottish film based on the book.

I've read all 3 trainspotting books, the 3rd is a prequel to the original.  They're horrible in the sense that they have detailed descriptions of rape, cheating wives and girlfriends murder, makeshift abortion, HIV, heroin use and all sorts but that's also what makes them so good.

Irvine Welsh wrote the books and he's also written a few others that have become films, acid house and filth are the ones I've seen.

If you haven't heard of this person before you might be in for a treat if you like pretty fucked up but well made films.

I have no idea how famous Irvine Welsh is in America, I don't even know if Americans would understand the Scottish accent all that well.  He also writes in the Scottish accent and I had to look up a few words to find out some Scottish slang.

[Shell B]

I've watched both Trainspotting and Filth, but had no idea they were based on novels by the same author. Now, I definitely see the similarities. If I didn't have a ridiculous "to read" list, I'd add them.

I'm not sure how interested I am in a Trainspotting 2.

[rexbeccarox]

Trainspotting is one of my favorite movies, and I really like Irvine Welsh: almost as much as I like Chuck Palahniuk.

[Rev. Rye]

I've seen the film and read the book. The film I loved and is one of the many films I'm toying with doing a review of for Anglotopia (and it's on my pretty sizable "Safe" list). The book, however, is one of the few that I decided to stop reading part of the way through, largely due to the thick Scots dialect being far more impenetrable in print than in film (something very rare for me). It really didn't help that the openings were so different:

Film Opening:






Book opening:

The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling. Ah wis jist sitting thair, focusing oan the telly, tryin no tae notice the cunt. He wis bringing me doon. Ah tried tae keep ma attention oan the Jean–Claude Van Damme video.

As happens in such movies, they started oaf wi an obligatory dramatic opening. Then the next phase ay the picture involved building up the tension through introducing the dastardly villain and sticking the weak plot thegither. Any minute now though, auld Jean–Claude's ready tae git doon tae some serious swedgin.

– Rents. Ah've goat tae see Mother Superior, Sick Boy gasped, shaking his heid.

- Aw, ah sais. Ah wanted the radge tae jist fuck off ootay ma visage, tae go oan his ain, n jist leave us wi Jean–Claude. Oan the other hand, ah'd be gitting sick tae before long, and if that cunt went n scored, he'd haud oot oan us. They call urn Sick Boy, no because he's eywis sick wi junk withdrawal, but because he's just one sick cunt.

– Let's fuckin go, he snapped desperately.

– Haud oan a second. Ah wanted tae see Jean–Claude smash up this arrogant fucker. If we went now, ah wouldnae git tae watch it. Ah'd be too fucked by the time we goat back, and in any case it wid probably be a few days later. That meant ah'd git hit fir fuckin back charges fi the shoap oan a video ah hudnae even goat a deck at.

I think the difference is clear.

[Shell B]

Trainspotting is one of my favorite movies, and I really like Irvine Welsh: almost as much as I like Chuck Palahniuk.

It's unusual for it to be like this, but I'm not a fan of Chuck's writing. I liked "Fight Club," the movie adaptation, but I tried to read one or two of his other novels and couldn't bear it. It feels strange for the sake of strangeness sometimes, and I don't like it.

Bizarre writers I love: Christopher Moore and Tim Dorsey.

[rexbeccarox]

Trainspotting is one of my favorite movies, and I really like Irvine Welsh: almost as much as I like Chuck Palahniuk.

It's unusual for it to be like this, but I'm not a fan of Chuck's writing. I liked "Fight Club," the movie adaptation, but I tried to read one or two of his other novels and couldn't bear it. It feels strange for the sake of strangeness sometimes, and I don't like it.

Bizarre writers I love: Christopher Moore and Tim Dorsey.

Oooh! Good ones!

But yeah... Chuck's sort of a take 'im or leave 'im kinda author.

[Rev. Rye]

As someone who actually likes Christopher Moore's works, I have to say I laugh at anyone who thinks his work is actually weird. I say this because there's a lot weirder shit in literature.

• Maldoror by the Compte de Lautreamont. It's a long prose poem about a misanthrope who sails the seven seas and at one point rapes a great white shark.
  
• The 13 1/2 lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers. To quote the Daily Telegraph's blurb: 'Within the first 15 pages I was carried away by the sheer craziness of it all. Some Minipirates find a baby bear with blue fur inside a walnut shell floating on the ocean towards a giant whirlpool. They rescue him and teach him about knots and waves, and that a good white lie is often considerably more exciting than the truth. Then, when he outgrows their ship to such an extent that he is in danger of sinking it, they abandon him on an island with a bottle of seaweed juice and a loaf of seaweed bread. Thus Bluebear comes to the end of his first life and embarks on his second. By the end of the book, he has expended exactly half of his 27 lives. Again and again, Moers confounds our expectations as the narrative twists and turns, travels backwards and forwards in time. Part science fiction, part fairy tale, part myth, part epic, the book is a satire on all these genres and so constantly satirises itself. Very amusing' 
  
• The Collected Works of Seth Grahame-Smith. He is a much weirder contemporary fiction author than Christopher Moore. Moore wrote a novel about Christ's adventures with his childhood pal and 13th apostle Biff. SGS wrote a book where the Three Kings, murderous thieves, have to shelter the Holy Family because Herod's behaving worse then they do.
  
• American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. This is a much more insane story than the film. Mary Harron had to neuter it to make it palatable for cinema audiences. Fans of the book are torn about whether or not this is a bad thing.
  
• The Complete World Knowledge Trilogy by John Hodgman. It's an almanac of a world much like ours, only much more insane.
  
• Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard. It works a lot better as an exercise in surrealism than the attempt at Space Opera made by a pulp writer gone increasingly unhinged as it really was. Gold-crazed psychlotic viruses enslave Earth, and cavemen stop them with technology that had been destroyed almost a millennium prior.
  
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. It's really worth mentioning that the fact that a bomb goes off every time Pirate Prentice gets an erection is one of the less weird things in the novel.
  
• Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. A British nobleman tells the story of his life, except he digresses so much it takes him a little less than half of the way through before he's actually born, he never gets past early childhood, and did I mention it was written in the 1750s?
  
• The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielzewski. The bulk of it's a transcript (transcribed by a blind man) of a found footage movie about a family that buys a house and how things start going pear-shaped as it turns out the house is 1/4" bigger on the inside than on the outside. And, yes, every instance of the word House is in blue. And also, there's sections of it struck-out and written in red.
  
• The 120 Days of Sodom by The Marquis de Sade. The 7th. 31. “He fucks a goat from behind while being flogged; the goat conceives and gives birth to a monster. Monster though it be, he embuggers it.” And yes, that's a direct quote.
  
• Naruto Veangance Revelaitons by BadassJakeT97. A monstrosity six inches tall with arms the size of redwoods and a penis longer than a bus engages in poorly-spelled rants about everything under the sun, and engages in the most depraved sex acts this side of the Marquis de Sade with his mother, newborn daughter, and the Naruto character who is somehow genetically identical to both of them. It also has more sex scenes than correctly spelled sentences.
  
• The Bear that Wasn't by Frank Tashlin. A bear wakes up from his hibernation one Tuesday to find his forest has been paved over to make way for a factory. When he awakens, everyone demands he get back to work and take off that silly fur coat he's wearing.
  
• Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan. Quiz Time: Sandbox-John Dillinger=X. Solve for X.
  
• Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. It's a novel where unhinged preachers in the Deep South blind themselves to see God. How is that not weird.
  
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Try to not look at this as a romance story. Look at how unhinged everyone is, especially Heathcliff.
  

And there's a lot more where that came from...

[Shell B]

Of course his shit is weird. I can't believe you think people shouldn't think it's weird because Wuthering Heights is weirder. Wuthering Heights is fucked up, but as far as literature goes, it's pretty par-for-course depressing.

[LastPoet]

Of course his shit is weird. I can't believe you think people shouldn't think it's weird because Wuthering Heights is weirder. Wuthering Heights is fucked up, but as far as literature goes, it's pretty par-for-course depressing.

As far as trainspotting goes, when I watched it, it felt so similar to my life at the time. So much stuff happens in the movie similar to what I saw. Except for the diving into the toilet part. Never quite had trip like that lol.

[Rev. Rye]

Of course his shit is weird. I can't believe you think people shouldn't think it's weird because Wuthering Heights is weirder. Wuthering Heights is fucked up, but as far as literature goes, it's pretty par-for-course depressing.

Okay, Wuthering Heights wasn't the best example (mainly put on because of the brain-breaking disconnect between readers' perception of the book and what's actually in it), but I still have to say, between the immortal Emperor Norton, zombie Santa, talking fruit bats, a baby girl becoming the Grim Reaper, and psychotic B-movie queens who may or may not be able to hear the fourth wall, I've read much weirder.

I guess once you read about a man raping a great white shark, gold-crazed viruses, the Electoral College living in nutrient slime, a house that goes apeshit because its owner wants a good adventure, sodomising one's newborn goat-child, women mutilating their vaginas as punishment for adultery, or a baby bear coming into consciousness in a walnut shell as it hurtles into a whirlpool, your standards of what constitutes "weird" become a lot higher.

Hell, I once wrote myself into a story witnessing the sight of my older self having sex with a dead squid as part of a publicity stunt arranged by the same sort of people pulling the strings in Mulholland Dr.