Zalokar

We are entering a time when words must be backed up by actions.

1.

In May of 2013, Dominique Venner, the former OAS terrorist turned semi-respectable historian and paladin of the French New Right (although there’s nothing new about it, really, it’s the same old Action française Catholic-monarchist bullshit, the same pompous argot of bourgeois murderers, the same hybrid of decadent rationalism and plagiarized German Romanticism, a style some say was inaugurated by Charles Maurras but may actually extend back to Ernest Renan or even Descartes), walked up to the altar of the Notre-Dame Cathedral and shot himself. He left a suicide note, and, in case the note was lost to the depredations of chance or the iconoclasms of the police, he left a blog post.

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“Sorrentinian anecdotes: 1. A friend once told me that he got a blowjob while watching Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, which seems like the perfect antidote to Haneke’s gloomy Austrian National Socialist moralism, his sanctimonious pornography of violence. 2. Another friend, or the same friend, I can’t remember, who occasionally suffered from psychogenic impotence, said that a girl once quoted Prufrock to him when he couldn’t get it up, which was such a wickedly tender thing to do (such a relief compared to all the put-on politically correct anti-phallodeterministic caritas he was used to in those situations) that he remembers it as one of the most intimate experiences of his life. 3. I told him, as if to reciprocate his self-mortifying candor, that an ex-girlfriend of mine, who was a crypto-Catholic depressive, used to read Ash Wednesday whenever she wanted to avoid having sex with me. We agreed on the superiority of early Eliot…”

David Golding explains (along the way) how/why he couldn’t resist the “mimetic bug” in this meditation on Gilbert Sorrentino…

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Celine’s pessimism—his hatred, even—is diagnostic, neutral, as humanitarian in its own way as the advances in antiseptic medicine made by his idol and the subject of his doctoral thesis, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, that ill-starred “savior of mothers.” One must always proceed deeper, lower, in Celine’s cosmos

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An oasis of whore in a desert of boredom: “La carte et le territoire”

Houellebecq, in the end, will probably be remembered as the kind of writer who never forgot to tell us how much an upscale prostitute charged extra for anal sex in the third millennium

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