Soumission by Michel Houellebecq

I feel a little sorry for Michel Houellebecq. In recent interviews he doesn’t look well at all. On the 7^th January, the day his new novel, Soumission, was due to appear, the Charlie Hebdo attacks took place. The victims included Bernard Maris, a friend of Houellebecq who had written the book, Houellebecq Economiste which appeared in France last year. To tie in with the release, Charlie Hebdo had devoted that day’s front cover to him. And the subject of the book? – an imagined France of the future governed by an Islamic party. Small wonder he cancelled his promotional tour and adopted a low profile.

Not that it has affected sales. Conceivably the terrible events of that week provided an uncomfortable promotional boost, with print runs exhausted and 120 000 copies flying off the shelves and through the Amazon warehouses. So, now that things have thankfully quietened down, what to make of this latest addition to his often controversial oeuvre?

First of all, like everything he’s done, it very readable. He’s an accomplished stylist and can tell a story, this time within a more literary framework than usual given that his narrator, François, is a university lecturer at the Sorbonne, whose area of expertise is the late 19th century decadent turned Catholic convert, J.K. Huysmans.

Huysmans (who I’ve never read but think I should) becomes an alter ego, in some part like Le Grand Meaulnes – “For all the years of my sad youth, Huysmans remained for me a a companion, a faithful friend”, the book opens – and in another way, like Sartre’s Rollebon, a doppelganger whose hold needs eventually to be relinquished. (Though Huysman’s religious conversion is salient to the plot in an unexpected way.)

François is the typical Houellebecq protagonist, a solitary, something of a depressive who nevertheless seems to enjoy a series of liaisons with a variety of young students.

 There is the usual ration of graphic  sex scenes, and the usual pessimism about the possibility of fulfilling or lasting relationships. Against this background, he presents us with a scenario where a moderate Islamic party, La Fraternité musulmane has grown, by 2022, to be one of the largest in France, challenged only by the Front National. As the elections approach, polling stations are attacked by armed gangs, his latest girlfriend escapes to Israel as Jews decide to abandon France, and he leaves for a journey of escape from Paris with no destination in mind.

This takes him to Martel in the Lot where he watches events unfold until order is restored, the Fraternité musulmane come to power and a new order is established. A chance meeting with a Péguy-quoting ex-secret service man prompts him to visit the nearby ancient pilgrimage site of Rocamadour, with its shrine of the Black Virgin. Verses of Péguy’s mystical vision of a sacred France resonate in his thoughts as he begins his journey. Which sounds, and is, rather contrived. But the contrivance is there to cement the theme of belief, and submission to it, a novel turn for a novelist more noteworthy previously for what Julian Barnes famously termed his ‘insolence’.

Not that insolence is entirely absent though, and François’ visits to Rocamadour and later, in imitation of Huysmans, a monastery, prove disappointing. But they indicate where he is headed, and as the situation calms and a de-laicised France submits to an Islamic government, he finds himself more at home than he might have expected.

I won’t give away any more, but while the tone is less embittered (or insolent) than usual, the tired but serene acceptance of what happens is not that far removed from the imagined science fiction conclusion of La Possibilité d’une île for example. Houllebecq and his not too distant narrators in their depression and their dissatisfaction are never heroic. They do things without passion, conviction or even much sense of agency. Postmodern to that extent, they nonetheless remain too clever, too in touch with older solider narratives not to present a sometimes viciously ironic, nakedly honest perspective on the way things are. Small wonder he isn’t looking too well.

And again...

...an unsourced quote from an page by Occupy Theory http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/421440326/tidal

Diving in again...

"We have been up all night, beneath electric lamps whose fluorescent souls are bright as the smell of ocean, because like them, we are breathing our last breaths before the plunge in search of a world that fits all worlds.

These damn streets. This crawling pavement. These birds finally waking up. Welcome Spring."

Underwater (again)

Two poems. The first, one of my own that gave the title to this blog, the second, a marvellous resonance of coincidence, as quoted by Richard Rohr in this wonderful talk and which he uses for the title and theme of his book Breathing Under Water: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8o6_IqKdy8

UNDERWATER

Heart is full of nothing

Need to start again

Bleed it full of feeling

And start to answer when

Head is full of trouble

Life is not alive, so

Devour a new intention

Learn to swim and dive

And seek out new confusion

Design, deserve, delight,

Desire, descend, re-surface;

Maybe, get it right...

And the second, which I won't try and interpret in any depth, but which I think Richard Rohr would say is about moving into the second half of life, by Sr Carol Bieleck RSCJ:

BREATHING UNDER WATER

I built my house by the sea.

Not on the sands, mind you;

not on the shifting sand.

And I built it of rock.

A strong house

by a strong sea.

And we got well acquainted, the sea and I.

Good neighbors.

Not that we spoke much.

We met in silences.

Respectful, keeping our distance,

but looking our thoughts across the fence of sand.

Always, the fence of sand our barrier,

always, the sand between.

And then one day,

-and I still don’t know how it happened - the sea came.

Without warning.

Without welcome, even

Not sudden and swift, but a shifting across the sand like wine,

less like the flow of water than the flow of blood.

Slow, but coming.

Slow, but flowing like an open wound.

And I thought of flight and I thought of drowning and I thought of death.

And while I thought the sea crept higher, till it reached my door.

And I knew, then, there was neither flight, nor death, nor drowning.

That when the sea comes calling, you stop being neighbors,

Well acquainted, friendly-at-a-distance neighbors,

And you give your house for a coral castle,

And you learn to breathe underwater.

Starting Over

Maybe I need to revive this. Here's a bit of very simple stuff. Maybe it says something...

Simple Really

What is there?
-what there is
what will change?
Only tears

who will care?
who will mind?
who will be
more than kind?

what makes sense?
what makes none?
what will be
when this has gone?

Charlie Gillett

Musically I've always needed a DJ to guide me, and Charlie, who has just died, was perhaps the best. Although I came to him pretty late in 2001 in fact, his programmes were a touchstone of good taste and pure love of music, respect for the artists, respect for the best of the old and the most interesting of the new.

The astonishing list of tributes on his website is moving not only because of the sheer numbers of people who've taken the trouble to say something, but also for the depth of feeling, the warmth, the respect, the feeling that they had not only been inspired or entertained musically but touched by a decent human being, a good man. That is rare and very worthy of record.

http://soundoftheworld.com/

Underwater (again)

The word 'underwater' came into a poem and then suggested itself as the title for all this stuff (and nonsense) - but why?

I discovered one certain source the other day, Robert Bly's superb Iron John, one of the books I go back to again and again. Not a perfect book; the style irritates, it's a bit too slick and American, but it recasts modernity poetically and mytholgically in a way that still resonates.

Modernity/postmodernity = lack of depth (so where do we go for depth? you've guessed!) and Bly frames the thesis around the Grimm Brothers story of the Wild Man discovered underwater. A book for men quite deliberately and explicitly, yet poetically/mythologically inclined females might like it too..

Reminded me of Hopkins too -"What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,O let them be left, wildness and wet;Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."

You need to read the whole thing. Perhaps you also need to read a lot of poetry first, but here's a taste:

"...going down through water to touch the Wild Man at the bottom of the pond is quite a different matter. The being who stands up is frightening, and seems even more so now, when the corporations do so much work to produce the sanitised, hairless, shallow man. When a man welcomes his responsiveness, or what we sometimes call his internal woman, he often feels warmer, more companionable, more alive. But when he approaches what I'll call the "deep male", he feels risk. Welcoming the Hairy Man is scary and risky, and it requires a different kind of courage. Contact with Iron John requires a willingness to descend into the male psyche and accept what's dark down there, including the nourishing dark..."

And I thought too of Excalibur, a sword caught, and taken underwater. Something else I'm diving to find.

Rant

The culture has been dumbed and dumbfounded, the language has been cheapened and blunted and everybody thinks they have to be so gawdam nice. No you don't. Be true, be good, be yourself. Be brave, be splendid, be ridiculous, anything.

Using big words is more offensive to some people than using bad words. They think you're putting one over on them.

The hardest thing to deal with is the truth. Power dictates its own, the New Labour spin machine set the template and so politics and business (two sides of the same bent coin) monopolise a soundbite vocabulary trying to tell you how it is, with all their dreadful cliches and jargon, "going forward"...(erm where exactly?) (Experience teaches that we experience things more in circular and cyclical fashion anyway - there is always change, but "progress" is a tired old myth.)

We need the truth and its cognate (?), trust to keep us sane. Not in the George Washington never-tell-a-lie way (tactful white mendacity has its place) but in order to maintain relationships, advance common purposes, even do business. Decent business, not glib customer service on a first name how-are-you-today basis. (You may wish me good day and establish that our relationships starts on good-mannered terms, but how I am, to you, a complete stranger, is neither here nor there and quite beside the point. We are effecting an impersonal transaction after all, not getting to know each other.)

I have been lied to so much that some basic honesty, even when it hurts, refreshes the soul. At least I know where I stand, even if I don't like it. If I'm not wanted, well, it may hurt a bit, I may smart and sulk, regret the loss of a connection that seemed sweet and valuable. But there are others. Soon come.

"Is it wrong to want to live on your own?" sang Morrissey. Well probably, but perhaps it's necessary to maintain sanity. "I must create my own system, or be enslaved by another's", wrote Blake, who Yeats so memorably described as "beating against the wall/Till truth obeyed his call."

It is a hard option, staying true to yourself in a society full of niceness and nonsense and bloody lies, risking isolation, being misunderstood or half understood or having people think you're an eccentric fool. Make a living, make a life. Combine them? Still haven't cracked it. Or as Joni sang, "I am on a lonely road and I am travelling" Still.

Ha ha!

Know Your Enemy

The devil says sleep
The devil does not say kill or rape
The devil does not say stay awake
The devil says sleep


The devil is real
The devil does not say hurt or steal
The devil prefers the bed the meal
The devil is real


The devil is mean
The devil avoids the noise the scenes
The devil prefers the cave of dreams
The devil is mean


The devil devours
The years the months the days the hours
The devil delights in funeral flowers
The devil devours

Utopian musings

The old situationist in me refuses to lie down or go away. From one point of view it's all so much utopian nuttiness and adolescent wish fulfilment; from another it is incredibly inspiring.

Perhaps it's also a displacement of the religious urge - well of course it is, calling for nothing less than the complete and utter transformation of this fallen world.

Back in January I was musing over the 'saturnine' - limits, order, boundaries, duty. Now I think I'm just trying to regain some inspiration. Though while the art and the books and the ideas are important, life can still be somewhere else. "I might have thrown poor words away", wrote Yeats, "and been content to live"...

The Hacienda must be built...

Writing yesterday, echoing around in the back of my mind was Chtchglov's sublime 'Formulary for a New Urbanism' - there is a theme there of building a new world in the ruins of the old which I like, but also one of remaking the things and places of this world as an opportunity to experience differently....

Endlessly quotable - dear departed old Tony Wilson took the bit about the Hacineda quite literally - a brave move, even if it did end up as just another nightclub - I still find the essay quite suggestive, immensely provocative.

Read the whole thing in full at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm but chew on this for the time being:

"A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences — sewage systems, elevators, bathrooms, washing machines.
This state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against poverty, has overshot its ultimate goal — the liberation of humanity from material cares — and become an omnipresent obsessive image. Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit. It has become essential to provoke a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires."

I was also reminded of Adrian Henri's mad 'Entry of Christ into Liverpool' - only remotely Christian really. It's really about that transfiguration of the everyday and the mundane and the profane - building the Hacienda, building up Jerusalem...

More thoughts on the "old world"..

A phrase I used last time to indicate what used to be, and what used to be better. My sometime intellectual hero Guy Debord used it however to signify a world that had to be surpassed and done away with, a world beyond the spectacle where we would see face to face, transparently. (Incidentally also the utopia of St Paul in 1 Corinthians). Phrases such as "the old world of spectacle and memories" or "the old world of hierarchy and alienated labour." abound in his writings.

So it is a futile gesture to see in the traces of that old world something suggestive of the new? I don't think so. It's not only in the arts that a return to the past for inspiration often proves fruitful. I will continue to muse on this. I will think of the correspondences between, say, cathedrals and great railway termini. There are clues in those traces of the past.

How hard it is....

...simply to engage with the world sometimes. Because the world is not enough, or rather the world outside my head fails to connect, or sometimes is simply not as interesting, as the world inside my head.

The old pictures and the old books and the the old songs of the old world make more and more sense the older I get. It is not simply nostalgia - I wasn't even old enough to fully appreciate what was happening in the sixties for example. The current culture is pretty uninteresting, unchallenging, simply not there.Or as an online friend wrote the other day, commenting on the current music scene:

"I've been told off for suggesting that new artists can never be as good as the good ol' gold old ones so I'd just like to make something clear: it's my contention that the the machinery of modern digital technology as used in making modern pop records, when coupled with the formidable machinery of the tabloid media and the way that showbusiness is in bed with it goes so far as to actively preclude the emergence of any genuinely remarkable pop personalities. It doesn't matter how much raw talent a performer has, in order for them to succeed they have to be fed into the Simon Cowell Sausage Machine. The public have had their tastes second guessed by professional smartarses for so long that they have grown to like it, to expect it, and anything that falls outside the Simon Cowell Sausage Machine remit will simply never be presented before a mainstream audience...

The dice of success are loaded against individuality and absolutely dead against young talented people having any chance to actually work out who they are, what they're trying to say and how they want to say it. Fit in or fuck off, is essentially the message. And I'm sick of it. " (Adam)

You could apply that to so many other art forms. My hope is that the economic downturn will open up space for stronger, more serious stuff everywhere. I really feel those shiny shallow nobodies with the money and the power have had their day. And maybe young people might begin to learn that they have a history, and a heritage.

The risks of art criticism...

... the main one of which is you might find yourself talking pure bollocks.

Just found another pic from the McCullin session, I think the fabs were just off their heads. In this one they're clearly just having a laugh.

Not that I take back everything I said. It so depends on your mood doesn't it.? Too serious, always been my problem...

The strangest picture of the Beatles ever taken?

Maybe it's also the best picture of the Beatles ever taken. Don McCullin. It is weird. It can't be a set up, McCullin isn't that sort of photographer. And the fabs were always up for pictures of them clowning around. But this isn't typical clowning is it?

Chief clown Lennon plays dead here. Or dying, or sick or something. An angelic McCartney looks at him attentively. Ringo looks like one of those suffering mothers in McCullin's war photographs. And Harrison, uninvolved, severe, just stares straight into the camera.

As I've never seen it before I guess they never released it at the time as not good for their image. Or maybe they saw it as some arty exercise. Though I'm not sure what to read into it. Four guys at the top of the world and the top of their game reveal their vulnerability, their mortality perhaps? (Lennon was the first to die, remember)

Of course it looks more like a McCullin photo than a Beatles photo. Though what he or what the Beatles thought they were playing at here is beyond me. Whatever it was, it's very strange, very haunting, very odd.

White bicycles

Somebody has been reading about the Amsterdam Provos, or listening to Pink Floyd.

They've even painted the tyres (won't last, I promise).

But the whole crazy idealistic point about white bicycles as a solution to urban transport problems was they were not chained up.

So nice idea, whoever you are, but it sort of misses the point...

POSTSCRIPT...

Four days later and I passed it again, still chained up in the same place. One of the tyres has gone flat. Maybe it's somebody's idea of street art. Nice slogan anyway.

Hello mellow

Sometimes the same old routine has its satisfactions. Sometimes, better scream, as Pete Wylie said. But a bit of lightness to my mood today. Wish it was intenser, but it can't always be intense. I often crave excitement. But today it's just cool. Read a bit, wandered around a bit. Took a few pictures. A bit of this. A bit of that. Mustn't grumble...

Valentine humbug

I hate the way this has become some sort of festival, or rather some sort of capitalist festival like Christmas has become, an opportunity to buy and sell things, market a 'valentine' experience. People have been taken in by it to the extent that they "celebrate" - which in a post Christian civilisation empty of true festival and ritual is understandable enough I suppose.

But it's still all so much bollocks really. If you love somebody you can celebrate every time you're together if you want to. Without the paid for paraphernalia of cards and disposable stuff.

As a healthy antidote I offer the beautiful young Chet Baker singing My Funny Valentine in that stoned strange strung out way of his - it's more erotic in a way than a million red cardboard hearts could ever be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvXywhJpOKs

Dutiful not beautiful

On the day when London was hit by the biggest snowstorm in years, tough guy here proved how cool he was by going into work. 75% at least didn't make it. I should have stayed home and had some fun instead.

January is bad news for summer babies - official

While I sometimes think astrology is a lot of superstitious nonsense, January always seems the time when, with the post-Christmas anti-climax and the sun in my opposite sign of Capricorn, that bad things seem to happen. Bad or bad-ish things have happened to A, B and C this month (I'll spare their real names). A isn't too bad - she just can't get a job, and the prospects don't look too good. B had some problem, the details of which remain a mystery, and she also got sick. And C is probably in the worst situation of all, but I'll spare the gory details... But all three, like me, are June and July summer babies, Cancer, Leo and Gemini.

Well so what? Well A, B and C have all affected me in varying degrees, but, with the wisdom of experience I've learned to keep my head down this month, not try to do too much, not risk anything, and above all, avoid anything like a New Year Resolution.

All that said though, I'm beginning this week with a cautious sense of optimism. The sun has moved from Capricorn to Aquarius, a new moon heralds the Chinese New Year, with a solar eclipse thrown in for good measure. Time to start moving a bit more, leaving some things behind, seeking new openings.

Shakespeare wrote something about the fault not being in the stars but in ourselves. Which is probably true. But sometimes in this crazy world, the stars seem to provide as useful a framework as any for getting your head around things.