Notes from the phone booth at the end of the world

I've never read any of his novels, and I wouldn't say that I agree with all of his views.

Still, Michel Houellebecq certainly interviews well. (Via A&L Daily)

On what seem to be the enormous challenges of French childhood reading:

And then there was Pif le chien, a comic book published by Editions Vaillant and sponsored by the Communist Party. I realize now when I reread it that there was a Communist bent to many of Pif’s adventures. For example, a prehistoric man would bring down the local sorcerer in single combat and explain to the tribe that they didn’t need a sorcerer and that there was no need to fear thunder. The series was very innovative and of exceptional quality. I read Baudelaire oddly early, when I was about thirteen, but Pascal was the shock of my life. I was fifteen. I was on a class trip to Germany, my first trip abroad, and strangely I had brought the Pensées of Pascal. I was terrified by this passage: “Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.” I think it affected me so deeply because I was raised by my grandparents. Suddenly I realized that they were going to die and probably soon. That’s when I discovered death.

Yes....and American parents are afraid of the damage that might be caused by Heather Has Two Mommies.

Anyway...

On visiting your neighbours:

The biggest consequence of The Elementary Particles, apart from the money and not having to work, is that I have become known internationally. I’ve stopped being a tourist, for example, because my book tours have satisfied any desire I might have to travel. And as a result there are countries I have visited that you wouldn’t ordinarily go to, like Germany.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you say that?

HOUELLEBECQ

Nobody does tourism in Germany. It doesn’t exist. But they’re wrong not to. It’s not so bad.

[Ahem: as pleased as I am with this glowing appraisal, it is apparent that some people -- well...at least from the Guardian -- do do tourism in Germany, and in our little corner of it, even.]

On inspiration:

INTERVIEWER

In your preface to The Possibility of an Island, you mentioned a journalist who inspired the idea for the novel. Can you explain?

HOUELLEBECQ

It was a pretty strange moment. I was in Berlin at a café on a lake, waiting to be interviewed. It was very quiet. It was ten o’clock in the morning. There was no one around. And this German journalist arrives and, it was very curious, she wasn’t behaving normally. She didn’t have a tape recorder and she wasn’t taking notes. And she said, “I had a dream that you were in a phone booth after the end of the world and you were speaking to all of humanity but without knowing whether anyone was listening.” It was like being in a zombie film.

I'm thinking of putting him on my to-read list, not least since he's written what sounds like an intriguing book about one of my favourite authors, H.P. Lovecraft.

Any views on the matter you might wish to share?

Following the herd down to Greece...

And now, a brief word from Konstantinos Lagoudakis, mayor of Malia on the island of Crete:

'They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit.'

Who might 'they' be?

Bet you'd never guess...

No fun in the sun

Sweet Jesus, please - not another "honest British holiday-makers denied access to superior facilities in blatantly pro-German Greek holiday resort" story.

Rhetorically, the article in the world's second greatest newspaper is a complete muddle and full of incomprehensible references to what appear to be (I wouldn't know) typical features of all-inclusive package holidays.

Such as: "Mr and Mrs B. were even told they had to pay for their own armbands, even though they were free for the German children."

Which frigging armbands? Like the Kabbalah one Madonna is wearing? The unidentified "Daily Mail Reporter" responsible for this sublimely intransparent piece does not seem to see the need to explain this apparently significant item of evidence to those of us unfamiliar with this kind of holiday.

What exactly happened on the (similarly) unidentified Greek island remains in the dark. The ins and outs of the alleged "segregation" between the unassuming (and ripped off) Brits and the (genetically, surely) expansionist Huns privileged by an unfair plot are never explained. For instance, mightn't it just be possible that the use of certain facilities had less to do with the users' nationality (which is the way the article presents it) than with the deal that people signed up to (and paid for)?

Not that the "Brazilian football club, superstar stage school [whatever that means] and family entertainment" that apparently lured the British family in question into booking this holiday from hell would tempt this here holiday maker to part with her dosh - no matter how free the drinks.

The following passage from the article would come in handy in a seminar on "Language and Ideology", however:

While German children enjoyed a sheltered play area, air-conditioned indoor facility and had their own toilets in a securely gated compound, British children were left to play in a hot, wooden hut with no gate, according to the family.

Sob, sob, sobbity sob. Apt essay topic on the basis of this article: "Constructing cultural otherness through language: Discuss."

Poshitty (needless)

We spent most of our day today in Cambridge, where, among other things, we had drinks in a popular al fresco eating place of some intellectual historical significance. A booklet distributed by the management provides a long list of famous (or at one point famous-to-be) visitors taking their cream tea underneath the humble apple and pear trees there while talking iambic pentameter and the double helix. Rupert Brooke, apparently, yearned for The Orchard during an unhappy spell in boring Berlin (on not so boring Berlin, see here).

And I agree: it is indeed rather nice there.

Now of all cream tea joints in the world it was here that I had to discover the greatest linguistic inanity of this trip yet.

On a laminated note (oh, lamination, that other English vice) pinned to a wall by the food counter, I was forced to read the following syntactic aggregate of disturbing ambiguity:

Deckchairs - please ensure that your deckchair is securely erected before being seated.

Am I the only one who finds the sound of this polite reminder - apart from irritatingly contorted - a trifle naughty?

Remembering "Das Reiseland DDR"

I was in Berlin last weekend and even almost twenty years after what we Germans call -- with all modesty -- "the change" ("die Wende") -- it still never ceases to amaze me that I can now wander around ALL parts of the city without fears of Stasi arrest, sniper fire or the need to change my substantial Western valuta into tin, anti-Monopoly money that, even with all the will in the world, you couldn't spend.

I even admit that I got quite emotional on Sunday morning, walking down a deserted Friedrichstrasse towards Checkpoint Charlie, which today lives on as a mere tourist gimmick. I'd been to East Berlin before 1989 and remember vividly the angst-inducing eeriness of being somehow in "enemy territory" after crossing the line between what we then saw as "us" and "them." Now it's all posh hotels -- on Sunday, someone asked me for directions to the Hilton, while standing on territory that once represented the epitome of anti-Hiltonness -- designer boutiques and gleaming high-end SUVs.

To give you a sense of the absurdity of that world we have lost (I can't give you a sense of the typical GDR smell of Trabant exhausts mingled with the unmistakeable whiff of brown coal vapours), I bring you -- via Der Spiegel -- an illustrative piece of GDR propaganda.

Note the references to the "Antifaschistische Schutzwall" ("antifascist protection wall") and the "ewig Gestrigen" (i.e. the eternally outdated adherents of capitalism). It's only auf Deutsch, I'm afraid, but the pictures -- along with the speaker's forward-looking tone underlined by the futuristic soundtrack -- speak for themselves.

Competition: Who can name the Russian traditional song, electronically and bossa-novacly distorted beyond recognition, played halfway through the clip?

Prize: Our amazement and respect (these don't come cheap).

More history

It's Good Friday, there is -- thanks to the crazy weather (we had a massive hailstorm earlier) -- a truly Biblical "darkness all over the land", and I guess we all deserve a little distraction on a day which tends to be a downer even for a dyed-in-the-wool atheist like me. And anyway, I've been meaning to point you to this interesting article in Der Spiegel about "Germany's secret superbunker" for a few days.

Disturbing to think that German politicians seriously thought that their subterranean Disneyworld (complete with lounge, beauty parlour and a stash of valium against the claustrophobia) would have withstood a full-blown nuclear strike: apparently the complex wasn't deep enough in the first place. And even during a "minor" attack the EMP would have shut down systems completely -- essentially locking in the German chancellor and his entourage forever

... until freed by a Princess who, trying to find the golden ball she had accidentally dropped in a crevice, inadvertently released a secret latch whereby the heavy steel doors would open and out would come ... a terribly dishevelled but still fundamentally sexy Prince Willy -- with his balalaika:


I had one hell of a crush on Willy Brandt when I was about four ....

Most of the 17 kilometres of the complex have been dismantled by now, but a small remaining part is now open to the public. So, as part of your Romantic grand tour down the Rhine, why not go visit. You might pop round for coffee and cheesecake chez nous afterwards ....