Fear eats the soul

I have to tell you something about the relations of strength between those who live in resentment, intoxicated by their bitterness, alienated by their melancholy and their bad blood, and those who, not so much out of virtue as through their makeup, self-discipline, or just because they have something better to do (e.g., a new book to write), manage to escape this merry-go-round of poisonous emotions. It is the second lot who, once again, for reasons of pure emotional mechanics, will triumph over the former. Joy makes them intelligent and strong, whereas spite is a poison and sooner or later poison kills.

Michel Houellebecq - Public Enemies

Why women should perhaps avoid men with too much Bukowski at home

I don't want to be loved in spite of what is worst in me, but because of what is worst in me. I even go so far as to hope that what is worst in me is what people like best about me.

Michel Houellebecq - Public Enemies

Why modern philosophy is a low stakes game

...the particular merit of Western philosophy is to have placed the question of truth center stage, sacrificed everything for it, going so far as to eventually consent to a form of suicide, reducing its own scope to that of an epistemological complement. It is Nietzsche, I think, that big subtle cat, who first recognized the dangers the sciences having more or less killed off revealed truths would have on philosophy itself. But it was he, consequently, who tried to taint the search for truth with suspicion. He thereby opened up in philosophy what might be called the era of disloyalty. Because what is philosophy if it relegates the search for truth to the background? We're pretty much back to the sophists.

Michel Houellebecq - Public Enemies

Back from making a new life

tokyo undressed

Dear Bernard-Henri Levy,

We have, as they say, nothing in common except for one essential trait: we are both rather contemptible individuals.

A specialist in farcical media stunts, you dishonor even the white shirts you always wear. An intimate of the powerful who, since childhood, has wallowed in obscene wealth, you are the epitome of what certain slightly tawdry magazines like Marianne still call 'champagne socialism' and what German journalists more astutely refer to as the Toskana-Fraktion. A philosopher without an original idea but with excellent contacts, you are, in addition, the creator behind the most preposterous film in the history of cinema.

Nihilist, reactionary, cynic, racist, shameless misogynist: to lump me in with the rather unsavory family of right-wing anarchists would be to give me too much credit; basically, I'm just a redneck. An unremarkable author with no style, I achieved literary notoriety some years ago as the result of an uncharacteristic error in judgment by critics who had lost the plot. Happily, my heavy-handed provocations have since fallen from favor.

Together, we perfectly exemplify the shocking dumbing-down of French culture and intellect as was recently pointed out, sternly but fairly, by Time magazine.

We have contributed nothing to the electro-pop revival in France. We're not even mentioned in the credits of Ratatouille.

These then are the terms of the debate.

Michel Houellebecq's first letter to Bernard-Henri Levy in Public Enemies

Back to work

...it’s true that I really wanted to make money so that I could quit my job. That’s the only point of having money, to have the freedom of your days, but it’s fundamental.

Michel Houellebecq, Paris Review interview

The disasters produced by the changing of values

What I think, fundamentally, is that you can’t do anything about major societal changes. It may be regrettable that the family unit is disappearing. You could argue that it increases human suffering. But regrettable or not, there’s nothing we can do. That’s the difference between me and a reactionary. I don’t have any interest in turning back the clock because I don’t believe it can be done. You can only observe and describe. I’ve always liked Balzac’s very insulting statement that the only purpose of the novel is to show the disasters produced by the changing of values. He’s exaggerating in an amusing way. But that’s what I do: I show the disasters produced by the liberalization of values.

Michel Houellebecq, Paris Review interview

Despite everything, something

Houellebecq, thinking about something

...this film strove to be a vigorous plea against friendship, and more generally against all non-sexual relationships. What in fact could two men talk about, beyond a certain age? What reason could two men find for being together, except, of course, in the case of a conflict of interests, or of some common project (overthrowing a government, building a motorway, writing a script for a cartoon, exterminating the Jews)? After a certain age (I am talking about men of a certain level of intelligence, not aged brutes) it's quite obvious that everything has been said and done. How could a project as intrinsically empty as two men spending some time together lead to anything other than boredom, annoyance and, at the end of the day, outright hostility. Whilst between a man and a woman there still remained, despite everything, something: a little bit of attraction, a little bit of hope, a little bit of a dream. [....]

Launching an attack on not only friendship, but all social relations as soon as they are unaccompanied by any physical contact, this film thus constituted - only the magazine Slut Zone had the perspicacity to notice this - an indirect eulogy to bisexuality, if not hermaphroditism. All in all, I was harking back to the Ancient Greeks. When you get old, you always hark back to the Ancient Greeks.

Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island, p60
Colorful profile from 2006 here

Houellebecq's one of the few writers I've read as an adult who makes me feel like when I was a teenager and fell in love with certain books, that things I kept secret from even myself were being clearly expressed and I was not alone in the world. Of course, that doesn't make those things healthy or right, only true to myself, which isn't always grand if the self needs more work.

When I taught English we would have classes on jobs, and the language for describing them was always inadequate - not all engineers are the same, or accountants, or clerks. There are more specific ways of making a living and a life than you could list in a day, the things you actually get paid to do, not the job title. Yesterday I saw man who worked for a coffee store at a busy intersection, and his job was to stand by a sign telling people not to park their cars or scooters out front and make sure that no one did. He had a bright orange jacket and a device like a toy light saber to draw attention to his enforcement role. There are far more jobs I don't want than ones that I'd prefer, which ought to make me lucky.

If I'd lived before the economic and social developments that allow an individual to thrive in a vast array of niches - then I'd been either f***ed or brought into line long ago, probably both simultaneously. I'm not a natural top dog, but I can't stand being in second place. Instead, I opt out of the system as much as possible, although that's a weak escape, as I remain a primate. My affinity for shamanism is half on the visionary / daydream side and half on the idea of being a socially sanctioned outcast who retains some status within the group as a whole, both of it and outside it. Essentially left alone, but able to survive.

Anyway, my classes have almost ended, only a few hours per week at the local university, and these are unlikely to continue next year, as they interfere with other things. So for the first time in a long while I'll have no work based interaction with people, and the thought is a little dizzying. I work at home, and my wife has her atelier elsewhere, out all day. She'll come home and wonder if I've spoken to anyone since the morning. Or I'll tell her that I went to a certain restaurant for lunch, and her usual response will be a (fake?) incredulous alone?

The only people I like to talk to for any length of time if I'm not being compensated are women, and perhaps it's hard to widen your circle of female friends for lunch / dinner dates when you're married, although it's something that I'm going to have to try and do when I come back from my vacation.

My wife encourages me to see other women, but I have no idea how sincere she is.

Related posts:
Man in a monkey suit
Animal nature

The Elementary Particles

The Singularity is when everything is supposed to change. Straw Dogs holds up the other side, that nothing ever does.

Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. p155

The future will be better everything.

Better junk food, better porn, better drugs, better distractions and better forms of control.

Sex, domination and boredom - any vision of the future that doesn't account for these is incomplete.