Breast Bread

A curious memento from today's New York Times:

On a flight from Paris to New York a year ago, [Michel Gondry] was served a piece of bread. And while it was most certainly the end of a baguette, he could see only one thing: the breast of his former girlfriend [...]

“I noticed that it had an unusual shape, and I started to eat it,” he said of the piece of bread. “And then it reminded me of her.”

So he took it home safe, and has kept it ever since, on a shelf.

“It’s a piece of bread,” he said. “I’m not going to cry over it. But there’s some sadness. It was a breakup that was never really explained. There wasn’t an argument.”

He does not really fetishize it, he said. But he can’t throw it out, either. Besides being an absurd yet tragic memento of his doomed flight on Air Love, it is also the most pure realization of Mr. Gondry’s double-duty approach to reality.

Monster Shopper

In her latest Critical Shopper column in the New York Times, Alexandra Kuczynski, the obscenely wealthy daughter of the Wall Street banker and (despite his Franco-Polish descent and naturalized US citizenship) current prime minister of Peru, Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski, shrieks at the spot of uncleanliness diminishing her shopping pleasure at the SoHo Apple store.

After noting the absence of staff to wipe down with "antibacterial spray" the keyboards and mice ("gripped by grimy hands all day long"!), she continues in the eloquent literary style that has won her a prestigious column at the paper of record:

On my last visit I saw one young man sneeze voluminously into his hands, then type on the keyboard and grapple with the mouse. Yuck! Two seconds after he left the station, a woman and her child began to fiddle with the mouse and keyboard. Triple yuck!

Of course her disgust at the unhygienic displays of the young mother and child might have been slightly more affecting had she not, some paragraphs earlier, admitted to throwing an iPod Mini — "ear buds and all — into a garbage can on Fifth Avenue" in a fit of annoyance, thus polluting the city with the electronic device's toxic heavy metals without a second's compunction.

Her obsessive self-regard and narcissistic sense of entitlement have rarely been on better display.

China Dolls

So how much of that 20-dollar Barbie doll "made in China" does China actually get? About 35 cents (or about three of her toes), according to an economist cited in this recent article.

Why? Because "often these days, 'Made in China' is actually 'Made by Someone Else' - by multinational companies from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States that are using China as the final assembly station in their vast global production networks" and who reap most of the profits.

"Analysts say this evolving global supply chain - which often tags goods at their final assembly stop - is increasingly out of step with global trade figures, which serve to inflate China into a bigger trade threat than it may actually be."

In other words, international sales that are being chalked up in China's favour (or disfavour, depending on your perspective) are actually being pocketed for the most part by American or other foreign companies.

"In a globalized world, bilateral trade figures are irrelevant," says the economist. "The trade balance between the U.S. and China is as irrelevant as the trade balance between New York and Minnesota."

Actually, not even cheap Chinese labour may save Barbie from her decline at the hands of the more popular and more ethnically diverse Bratz dolls. In a desperate move to revive slumping sales of the behind-the-times Barbie, Mattel has decided to revive her romance with Ken, who has undergone a makeover that includes a more manly jawline, a motorcycle jacket and cargo pants, and some attractive dabbling in Buddhism, reflecting perhaps his pseudo-Asian heritage.

Houellebecq on Parenting

A recent biography of the French writer Michel Houellebecq confirmed what most readers probably already suspected, namely that much of his fictional work was taken directly from 'life'. The figure of the mother, in particular, has been singled out for especial abuse in his work. Like the appallingly negligent mother in Les Particules élémentaires, according to this article in the London Review of Books (via Arts & Letters Daily) Houellebecq’s mother “was born to a pied-noir family in Algeria, became a student radical, trained as a doctor and then lived an alternative, itinerant lifestyle” (in the book she “joins a sinister cult and spends much of her time bedding young men and boys”).

As for Houllebecq’s father, well, he was dispensed with at the beginning of Plateforme:

Father died last year. I don’t subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.
As I stood before the old man’s coffin, unpleasant thoughts came to me. He had made the most of life, the old bastard; he was a clever cunt. ‘You had kids, you fucker . . .’ I said spiritedly, ‘you shoved your fat cock in my mother’s cunt.’ Well, I was a bit tense, I have to admit; it’s not every day you have a death in the family.

Houellebecq himself was abandoned by his parents, “who set off across Africa in a 2CV five months after their son’s birth and left him with his grandparents in Algiers. Michel only saw his parents during the holidays. “‘I grew up with the clear knowledge that a grave injustice had been done to me,’ he told one interviewer. ‘What I felt for them was mostly fear, as far as my father was concerned, and a clear disgust vis-à-vis my mother.’ ‘Until my death, I will remain an abandoned little child, howling from fear and cold, starved of caresses.’"

Indeed, Houellebecq condemns not only his parents but their generation of hippies and soixante-huitards for all manner of social disaster. In Atomised, the cult to which Bruno’s mother belongs turn from free love to ritual murder. In one of the most quoted passages from the book, Houllebecq writes: ‘Actionists, beatniks, hippies and serial killers were all pure libertarians who advanced the rights of the individual against social norms and against what they believed to be the hypocrisy of morality, sentiment, justice and pity. From this point of view, Charles Manson was not some monstrous aberration in the hippy movement, but its logical conclusion.’

Given the monstrous injustice Houellebecq feels was commited against him by his parents, one might think he’d treat his own children a little better, in his books, if not in life. In life we learn that Houellebecq produced a child from a short early marriage. How sad, then, to read in his latest book, the following: ‘On the day of my son’s suicide, I made a tomato omelette . . . I had never loved that child: he was as stupid as his mother, and as nasty as his father.’

Judging a Book ...

On the backflap of the dustjacket to John Carey's new book What Good are the Arts? can be read the following brief biography:

John Carey is the Chief Book Reviewer for The Sunday Times (London). He has been at various points in his life a soldier, a television critic, a beekeeper, a bartender, and a professor of literature at Oxford.

He is also, evidently, an ass. The blurb alone was enough to convince me not to venture further. You can tell a lot about a book from its blurbs. Shameless boasting is not something that speaks well for a writer, particularly when he tries to mask it with fake humility. Indeed, there is something boastful about the way Carey allows himself to list even his humbler professions, namely beekeeper and bartender.

It reminded me of what is undoubtedly the best (or worst) example of obnoxious blurbing in recent times. That distinction belongs to Arthur Phillips, who had the following printed about himself on the dustjacket of his book Prague:

Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion. He lived in Budapest from 1990 to 1992 and now lives in Paris with his wife and son.

Gladiator Facts

Among the other tidbits offered in this review of a new book about gladiators is the curious fact that Emperor Domitian once organized nighttime games in which female gladiators (gladiatrices?) fought dwarfs by torchlight.

The book, entitled The Gladiators: History’s Most Deadly Sport is by a professor of ancient history at the University of Amsterdam (named, rather curiously, Fik Meijer, a name that might be translated as "Fuck Better")

Other curious facts: Gladiators attended schools and belonged to unions, were fed a diet mostly of barley gruel (which earned them the nickname "barley-porridge-eaters"). Many committed suicide, few won freedom, and the Colosseum had no toilets. There was a taxonomy of gladiatorial types based on weapon and armor; a thraex (small shield, sword like a dagger), for example, was to be distinguished from a retiarius (shielded left arm, trident, net) .

Quote of the Day

"One of the reasons that the word "communitarian" sounds so sickly and vapid--apart from the fact that it is sickly and vapid--is its inauthentic nostalgia. A sense of community and solidarity is either innate or it is nothing: If you have to call something a community these days ("the business community," "the Hispanic community," best and worst of all, "the intelligence community") then it almost certainly isn't one."

Christopher Hitchens in the Weekly Standard