helltotheno

I also am trying to find a job in my area, with little success. Michigan is not friendly to the unemployed unless they aren't actually looking for work, it seems. That is, if I'm to use our easily exploitable Unemployment Benefits Program by any measure. It's almost like they reward the people who are simply lazy while the people who get laid off or actually lose a job and wish to find more work get punished.

At any rate, I wanted to discuss Palaniuk. I read his books, and I sort of gave up on him. Like Stephen King, he's far too formulatic for me. The structure, the inherant bones, if you will, of his stories, are nearly identical and that sort of bothers me when a writer does that. I also dislike his constant reliance upon angst and how he treats it as actual pain in his characters. Angst is not pain, it is the expectation of pain. What I feel he usually ends up with is a bunch of high school characters running around in what appears to be a gritty and dirty episode of Curb Your Enthusiam. The only pain these people are experiencing is imaginary, and doesn't exist yet. I say if you're going to write books that are emotionally and psychologically charged, you need to locate the proper source, first. Fight Club was wonderful, but he should have stopped there and moved on to a different style of story-telling to keep his ideas fresh. I recall he attempted a sort of "travel guide" which I flipped through a bit, but nothing really grabbed me about it.

But that's just my opinion on his writing, heh. I've actually met the man, and he's a truely nice guy. Even took the time, after reading to us a few of his favorite parts, to field a massive amount of questions. He seems like someone, if I ever got the chance to sit down and have a coffee with him, we'd have a lot to talk about.

[Edited on May 16, 2006 8:57AM]