INTERVIEWER

What is your concept of the possibility of love between a man and a woman?

HOUELLEBECQ

I’d say that the question whether love still exists plays the same role in my novels as the question of God’s existence in Dostoyevsky.

INTERVIEWER

Love may no longer exist?

HOUELLEBECQ

That’s the question of the moment.

INTERVIEWER

And what is causing its disappearance?

HOUELLEBECQ

The materialist idea that we are alone, we live alone and we die alone. That’s not very compatible with love.

INTERVIEWER

Your last novel, The Possibility of an Island, ends in a desolate world populated by solitary clones. What made you imagine this grim future in which humans are cloned before they reach middle age?

HOUELLEBECQ

I am persuaded that feminism is not at the root of political correctness. The actual source is much nastier and dares not speak its name, which is simply hatred for old people. The question of domination between men and women is relatively secondary—important but still secondary—compared to what I tried to capture in this novel, which is that we are now trapped in a world of kids. Old kids. The disappearance of patrimonial transmission means that an old guy today is just a useless ruin. The thing we value most of all is youth, which means that life automatically becomes depressing, because life consists, on the whole, of getting old.

--from The Paris Review interview with novelist Michel Houellebecq, the Iggy Pop of fiction, and Iggy would agree.

And what an evocative picture this passage in the interview conveys:

INTERVIEWER

Tell us about Pattaya, Thailand, where the sex tours take place.

HOUELLEBECQ

I was completely fascinated by Pattaya, where the book’s ending takes place. Everyone goes there. The Anglo-Saxons go there. The Chinese go there. The Japanese go there. The Arabs go there, too. That was the strangest part. It was something I read in a guidebook that made me make the trip to Thailand. They said that in one hotel in Bangkok, the Thai prostitutes wore veils to please their Arab clients. I found that fascinating, that adaptability. There are lots of French Algerians from the projects who go to Pattaya for the whores. So the Thai girls speak French but with a ghetto accent. “Ouais, j’tassure! Ouais, ta mere!”

There are karaoke bars for the Japanese, restaurants for Russians with lots of vodka. And there’s a poignant side to it, too, something end-of-the-road about all these people, especially the old Anglo-Saxons. You sense they’ll never be able to leave. And there’s the dust, in the afternoon, when the go-go bars are still closed. There’s something very poignant about that moment when the girls start arriving on their scooters and you see the old Anglo-Saxon tourists start to come out like turtles walking in the dust. There is something very, very strange about that town.

The Paris Review containing the Houellebecq interview is now available at newsstands and bookstores. I know, because I bought a copy today to read over brunch, because I believe in supporting literature, something the rest of you might want to consider, not that I'm trying to nag.

If the afterlife is as boring as it's portrayed in Hollywood eternity spas such as Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life or Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait, why bother dying? It seems like such a waste of a good life, to put in all that effort and end up in a frost-free refrigerator.

That is the unintentional eschatological question posed by Clint Eastwood's Hereafter, which had Tom Shone contemplating his own mortality as each minute ticked a slow death in the theater, as if time had developed tired blood.

In Clint Eastwood's drippy Hereafter, Matt Damon plays a retired psychic named George who only has to brush up against somebody and — boom — he is visited by visions of the afterlife. This appears to resemble every other vision of the afterlife you've ever seen on film, which is to say, like the business' traveller's suite at Heathrow airport after you've accidentally doubled up on contact lenses. Fearful of his gift, George spends most of his time fending people off, living one of those solitary, spinsterish lives people are always living in Eastwood films: supper for one to the wistful accompaniment of a one-fingered pianist, before retiring to bed, where George lies, both arms beneath the sheets, listening to Derek Jacobi reading Little Dorrit. He appears to be preparing himself for mummification.

[snip]

The whole film is like one enormously elongated first act, during which everyone sort of mosies about, getting into position; then something happens and the whole thing is over. I just felt sorry for Damon, who seems to be playing almost twice his age, doing through the dusty, melancholic motions, occupying the space normally occupied by Clint himself; as for that ghastly v-necked woollen jerkin he is forced to wear throughout the whole movie, it conjured a vision of eternal damnation all its own.

When I first read the last sentence above, I had an Emily Litella moment and thought Damon was wearing a woollen gherkin, but which would have been a challenge for the wardrobe department, though I'm sure they would have done their best--anything for Clint.

...in general, different states of consciousness from the normal are regarded as a form of sickness. And therefore official and institutional psychiatry constitutes itself the guardian of sanity and of socially approved experience of reality. And very often it seems to me that [this] reality appears the world is seen on a bleak Monday morning.

--from a talk by one of the world's great enduring teachers, Alan Watts, that's part of a special Alan Watts double bill on the Psychedelic Salon podcast, an aural kaleidoscope of revelatory goodies.

In the humidor tradition of such well-manicured belletrists as Clifton Fadiman and Orville Prescott, IOZ pulls down the latest Michael Cunningham novel from the Barnes and Noble shelf and shares his critical "impressions":

By Nightfall, his new book, is typical. A vaguely dissatisfied, generally middle-aged, somewhat unhappily married, fairly prosperous, mostly unremarkable New York art dealer drifts into his forties, finds himself . . . well, drifting, and because this is a Michael Cunningham novel, he falls into a swoon for his wife's much younger brother, a homosexual set piece whose lovingly described body is lugged on and off the stage at various important scenes like a divan in a Donizetti, something pretty to fall against while warbling. This Mitchell Gold sofa is nicknamed "Mizzy," or The Mistake, an affectation and a telegraph so stunningly tone-deaf and totally out of place that it feels as if it were accidentally inserted from the novelization of a Logo original movie.

[snip]

By Nightfall moves between scenes of relentless interiority, by which I mean the boring personal taxonomy of an overanalyzed yuppie's mental architecture, and catty art-world commentary. The art stuff is occasionally funny, but depressingly phoned-in. Its hustlers and fakers, its earnest believers, and its ancillary clients and artists are all of type, and it reads like an impression of what the world of contemporary art is like by a person who has read a lot of people's impressions of what the world of contemporary art is like...

I remember picking up Cunningham's The Hours, hoping to see what all the fuss was about, and finished it feeling as if I were buried in autumn leaves raked in from Written on the Wind. It was poignant and tender and stately in the all the ways that constitute "literary fiction" at its most prosy-prayerful, a stain-glass window of "luminous" wisdom, so of course it won the fucking Pulitzer and became a poignant, tender, moving Meryl Streep movie, as if we hadn't all suffered enough.

Some killjoys in IOZ's comments section question his writing about novels he doesn't like, when there is so much good in the world. Dale Peck must have gotten a lot of this too from the pious flock, one reason why he finally put down his ax.

To prepare yourself--to steel yourself--for the all-important, mega-significant, globally crucial season finale of Mad Men, be sure to catch to the conversation between Elvis Mitchell and series creator Matthew Weiner, recorded at a strip club rented for the evening by KCRW, if I'm not mistaken.

You can listen, watch, or download the episode, depending on whether the elastic on your bandwidth has enough "hold" to keep your underwear from slipping.

What is my favorite part of the interview? Probably about 48 minutes in, when Weiner begins discussing Pete and Trudy, how Pete's evolved as a character, what makes Trudy and what the actors bring to those roles.

As you know, one of my mottos is, You can never get enough Pete and Trudy.

I have no idea how I'm going to cover the Mad Men finale, whether I'm going to live-blog it and then post it afterwards, relatively raw and uncut, do something more pretentious contemplative the next day, or spread my afterthoughts throughout the week in tasty little insight-McNuggets. I'll figure it out later, winging it existentially as Norman Mailer and Jean-Paul Sartre would do if they were playing racquetball together while Simone de Beauvoir watched from behind the glass, tightening her turban.

Meanwhile, I share Weiner's outrage over AMC showing a key moment in the finale when Megan opens a closet door in Don's apartment and finds the Batman costume hanging there, glistening-black. I think we can all agree that's a rather big "reveal" that might better been held back until broadcast, but that's the culture we live in, sadly; enslaved to the instant gratification of premature ejaculation.

Slip into your favorite striped pajamas, pop a marshmallow into a cup of hot chocolate, and prepare to stay up past your bedtime (unless you're a night prowler) to catch the Muse of the White Wolf, Kim Morgan, introducing two of her fave films--Something Wild, starring Carroll Baker, and He Ran All the Way, John Garfield's last movie--tonight on TCM as part of its Critics' Choice series this month.

Not to be a party poop or anything, but a number of these Critics' Choices strike me as uninspired and predictable: The Third Man, Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, Sweet Smell of Success. So hurray for the individuality of Kim's choices (of course, we expected no less, but still!) and those of Leonard Maltin, who went for Penthouse, spotlighting Myrna Loy, and Skyscraper Souls, a Depression-era melodrama set in a towering allegory, starring Warren William.

Warren William--well, all right!

Well done, Maltin!

If your precious sleep is too important for you to stay up late, I suppose you could DVR tonight's double bill. You have my permission.

Yesterday, as I was working on the Mad Men update on the picnic table that serves as my desk on the back porch, I saw in the corner of my eye a winged pair of oncoming blurs, one of which caromed off the glass, the other making a thunk. That didn't sound good.

I went outside and there, lying in the grass with its wings spread, was a yellow-rumped warbler, dazed but still breathing.

My concern was that it had broken its neck upon impact and was helpless, done-for. But it was also possible that it simply needed to regain its bearings. I didn't to handle the bird in any way that might stress it so I kept checking on it every few minutes, keeping vigilant watch that none of the cats in the neighborhood allowed to roam free didn't pay a call.

At one point I came out and the bird was still breathing but otherwise motionless, a reddish worm-like insect crawling towards its exposed eye. I blew lightly and the insect was knocked off, the leaves around the warbler rustling.

A few minutes later I checked on its condition again and the warbler had folded its wings and gotten itself upright, its neck moving slightly, indicating it hadn't been broken, but otherwise remaining where it was. I took out my trusty little Canon SD970:

The phone rang, I went to take it, and after a brief conversation I left the porch and warbler was gone. I checked the perimeter and it was nowhere around, so it hadn't dragged itself off anywhere, nor where there any loose feathers, leftovers from some predator's lunch.

So I can only believe it got itself airborne, a great relief. The world can never have too many warblers.

...if my Mad Men recap is up.

Yesh!

Working on the Mad Men recap in penitential darkness, the way God intended.

It's art appreciation night on Mad Men--beginning...now!--as Don stares at a painting until it stares back and speaks to him, tells his unconscious what needs to be done.