Sunday - Writing, No Kings, Michel Houellebecq,

Up and writing early, then to church. After church, a nap and more writing. I have a bunch of my prison journal starting next week. A trip to the convenience store around seven pm. And that wraps up my day.

I leave you with some items read or listened to today:

 Compassion or Compliance in the Church: Which Path are We On? - Public Orthodoxy

England’s time of troubles - Engelsberg ideas

The anatomy of the spy novel - Engelsberg ideas

Michel Houellebecq is a French writer that intrigues me - how to represent the unpleasantness of life. So, I read It Turns Out He Has a Heart | Los Angeles Review of Books

FOR TOO LONG, the edgelords have claimed Michel Houellebecq. Right-wingers take delight in the French author’s reputation as a provocateur, including his central role in lawsuits for calling Islam “the stupidest religion” and for partaking in a sex tape with young artists. The misogyny peaked in his 1994 debut novel Whatever (when I went looking for a stream of its film adaptation, I could only find one on an incel forum, where men in the comments groaned about the lack of rape scenes). His Islamophobia reached its pinnacle in 2001’s Platform, whose depictions of a terrorist attack somewhat prophesied the bombings in Bali a year later. Last October, New York’s hipsters-turned-MAGA (including talentless hacks like Peter Vack and Coldhealing) got together and called themselves Houellebecqian e-boys. With Annihilation (tr. Shaun Whiteside, 2024), the 69-year-old’s alleged final book, Houellebecq has once again shown that he has far too much compassion to be conflated with such a soulless scene.

For the conservative-leaning publication Unherd, Ann Manov lamented that Houellebecq’s “sentimental swan song [fell] flat.” “I mourn the venom,” she went on. “I mourn the badness. I mourn the bad guys.” But reducing Houellebecq’s characters to “bad guys” is misleading. The source of their bitterness can often be traced back to a culprit: “Bruno’s earliest memory was one of humiliation,” Houellebecq writes in The Elementary Particles (1998; tr. Frank Wynne, 2000), showing how misogyny is a result of emasculation. Similarly, Islamophobia is a projection of fear, as when the Platform protagonist’s father is murdered by a Muslim man. He seeks revenge but instead meets only more defeat when his lover is killed in a terrorist attack. He is not a bad guy; bad things happen to him that turn him resentful.

‘Odd things happened when she was around’: the unnerving vision of Muriel Spark  The Guardian

The Pretenders: Learning to Crawl Album Review | Pitchfork

Favorite Fictional Characters: Lord Peter Wimsey | Humanum Review

What People Were Saying on Both Sides of the "No Kings Protest" in Indiana & Ohio:

Sorry about the lack of comment, but I have worn myself out typing up my prison journal from 2014.

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