Rob Pattinson: Breaking Dawn Paris Promotion - Houellebecq

New Image of Rob - Man - Playa

Stroke of genius his new look

Forces the interviewers to relate to him as a man, a playa, a serious contender in the world of celebrity
With this look it is impossible for them to treat him like a beautiful silly adorable boy
who plays a vampire

Xavier in Paris asks some serious questions, not silly American ones about his gf

Xavier: Last question; is it true that you like Michel Houellebecq?
Rob: Yeah, definitely. I was supposed to meet up with him the last time I was in Paris and then I couldn’t do it but yeah, he’s one of my favorite writers.
Xavier is a real interviewer. This is how you do it. (entire interview)


He knew very well that Rob has read Houellebecq because he does his homework.(My post here) The question is a "floating sign" to Rob that he is intelligent, asks interesting questions, and is hip - probably ensuring Rob will favor him in the future. The question is also a "floating sign" that he sees Rob as an intelligent well-read man, not a silly Hollywood movie star, whose fangirls want to "jump his bones".  And it is the very LAST question so it screams out. Perfect placing in time. And clearly Xavier likes Houellebecq or he wouldn't have highlighted him. Nor linked him to Rob. With Paris adoring Rob, and Rob regarding Houellebecq as "one of my favorite writers", Xavier has used Rob's affection for Houellebecq to punch a hole into the media's Dominating Discourse about Houellebecq. This is how it is done folks. Or at least 1 way.



You can bet the farm that his Parisian fangirls will be at the bookstores tomorrow getting Houellebecq and watching The Prophet on DVD, since he mentioned Jacques Audiard. Meanwhile back at the ranch his American fangirls are drooling over his new look, his mouth, his hair, his clothes, his sexiness, etc etc etc. Now do you suppose Rob would prefer a European or an American fangirl?


The MDD about Houellebecq is hatred. BHL and Houllebecq are considered Public Enemies so BHL suggested they write a book of letters to each other. They don't know each other as acquaintances or as friends. Houellebecq is everything BHL is not. The one thing they share is the hatred they inspire. 


This quote translated by curioushairedgal indicates why many would hate him for writing this:

 "But I have come to think that religions are primarily attempts at explaining the world; and none of the attempts to explain the world can hold water if it hurts our need for rational certitude. Mathematical proof, experimental procedure are the definitive acquisitions of human consciousness. I am well aware that it appears the facts contradict me, I am well aware that Islam - by far the most silly, the most fake and the most obscurantist of all religions -- seems to be on the increase; but it is just a superficial and transitory phenomenon; in the long run, Islam is condemned even more so than Christianity."(Atomised)

And in the same book he writes this:

“In the midst of the vast, barbarous world of nature, human beings have sometimes (rarely) been able to create little warm places irradiated by love.  Little enclosed spaces, private spaces, where intersubjectivity and love reigned.”  Les Particules elementaires (“Atomised”)

The Art of Struggle  and other reviews of Houellebecq in The Truth About Lies blog at blogspot

The Art of Struggle … investigates issues of alienation, individualism and disillusionment

"Given the characteristics of the modern era, love can scarcely manifest itself anymore. Yet the ideal of love has not diminished. Being, like all ideals, fundamentally atemporal, it can neither diminish nor disappear."

If you knew the GAN Tower

Then you’d know my life

(from untitled poem on p.47)

There’s even a photo of La Tour First (First Tower) as it’s called these days at the start of the book. It’s in an area of Paris known as La Défense which Houellebecq would know well because he worked there as a computer programmer before making his living as a writer. It crops up in two other poems:

I came across an old prole

Looking for the son he’d lost

In GAN Tower, the graveyard

Of disheartened revolutionaries.

(from untitled poem on p.73) 

Michel Houellebecq, Rester vivant(The Art of Struggle or How To Live) (1999)  

Pieces a blog devoted to reading and also Houellebecq

You will never know exactly what part of you pushes you to write. You will only know it through approximations and contradictions. Egotism or devotion? Cruelty or compassion? All are possibilities. This is proof that, ultimately, you know nothing; so do not behave as if you knew. Before your ignorance, before this mysterious part of yourself, remain honest and humble.]

And this is how Houellebecq got me writing again.

He'd love to work with Jacques Audiard, the French director and Jack Nicholson if he could.  

All you fangirls out there who want to know what he wants to do next, did you get it that he just told you:

Stendhal
"who speaks of beauty as a promise of
happiness" 
Nietzsche in Genealogy
of Morals

Jacques Audiard's recent film was The Prophet (netflix pic and review). I saw it and it was wonderful. This is how Bardot got Godard who had no idea she wanted to work with him. Saying stuff like this got Cronenberg for him. Gus Van Zant audtioned for Breaking Dawn after he heard Rob wanted him for it. Scummit was too dumb though and Van Zant is used to being asked, not competing, so he didn't push himself flamboyantly at them the way they wanted.

Small independent filmmakers don't go after stars like Rob because they think they cost too much and they can't afford it. So he is telling them that he wants to work with them. The Prophet is a low budget very fine film. It got independent theatre distribution.

Reading Savage's Hide and Drink Through Twilight

There's more here on Hide and Drink.

Hide and Drink

Edward Cullen Entering the Cafeteria

This is the moment the audience and Bella first see Edward Cullen in Twilight. 

For those who haven't seen the film or read the books,  this is prior to the scene in the biology lab where Edward imagines all the ways he is going to kill Bella and drink her blood. 

All this precedes the opening of Hide and Drink but it is not necessary for reading Hide and Drink, but does add to the horror. Hide and Drink is a fanfic based on Meyer's Twilight.

The resonances with H.P.Lovecraft are inescapable. In Meyer's Twilight Lovecraft is only on the periphery. In Hide and Drink Lovecraft breathes through it. In his book on Lovecraft, Houellebecq has given us a portrait that is loving, respectful and profound. And he has said about Lovecraft, How does he do it! And in fact you cannot know. Lovecraft is all seduction and there is really no way to produce his seductive horror without entering the Order of Seduction and leaving the Order of Production, mimicry,reproduction far behind. I have already said elsewhere that this is what Savage does in Hide and Drink.

Savage has created an Edward from his Double, the monster that emerges and is kept down in the  biology lab scene, but which takes precedence in Hide and Drink. Edward goes to Bella's house, attacks her, drinks from her and instead of draining her and killing her has the idea that if he keeps her he can go on drinking indefinitely until and unless he kills her on purpose or accidentally. So he abducts her and makes her his captive. 

I was taking her blood in gulps. I had to slow down or she would be dead in seconds.And when she dies, this blood will die with her.

There was no other blood like this. Once she was gone, it would no longer be within my grasp. But if I stopped now, she would heal. Her body would make more. The blood would replenish. I could drink again. The promise of more – it was the only incentive that could have caused me to stop.

My tongue slipped over the cut, sealing it. (H&D 1 Bite and Run) And here we have Baudrillard's Impossible Exchange.

He takes her to a remote cabin in Canada. He knows he has to ration her blood, so he decides on every three days. We feel the excessiveness of this and how it weakens her and our anxiety increases with hers. When the three days are up, and she has finished her last meal of the day:

Once she finished her final meal of the day and started to clean up, I decided I had waited long enough.

I inhaled deeply.

There was a difference in the scent from the day before, even if it was slight. It was a little darker, deeper, and more pungent. I watched it flow through the vein in her neck as she reached down into the sudsy water for another supper dish.

I stepped up behind her, my finger drawn there, to that spot just under her ear. I ran my finger along the bluish line and her body stiffened when I touched her.

"Its time," my voice came out in a hoarse whisper. Her breath caught in her throat. (3 Cry and Consume)

And so we enter into a rhythm. The days after he feeds he is more relaxed, he tries to make her comfortable, gets movies for them to watch, is considerate. Gradually his anxiety builds up as his need increases again. But the reader has entered her horror. We know the feeding time is coming again and we, as does Bella, anticipate it in fear. It is the waiting that permeates everything between them and us also. This is the skill Lovecraft has in his stories. Everything is quiet but completely apprehensive, the terror an awful presence. Worse because it is silent and invisible. We wait for Edward's words,

It's time.

Because this is when Death stands there in the room..                                                                                                              
I absolutely could not read this without thinking and feeling the whole time of Jaycee Dugard. Garrido, like Edward, is predictable. They both perseverate, repeat, and the horror of Jaycee feeling the rhythm of his need, knowing the time is approaching again, and being alone in the meantime as Bella is not, is to experience her feelings in an almost intolerable way. Savage has created a fiction that informs us with a knowing. It is worth far more than all the circulating information, fed us by the media, that we know about her captivity.

Edward takes her into the bedroom, restraining her for the drinking and then holds her and soothes her afterwards telling her how sorry he is over and over and over and he knows he will never stop. In Bella's despair she clings to him because there is no one else there for comfort as she sobs.

And it is so very erotic. The reviews often mention that fact and the reviewers feel perverted for feeling that way. So we enter DeSade's world I think. Because it really is incredibly erotic in the way it affects the reader.

For Savage's Hide and Drink Edward

The blood blossom flowers

At the fragile girl's throat

The vampire leans down

Holding her imprisoned supine form

His mouth open

His lips caressing

Silken skin suckling

Plumbing pulsing each precise

droplet

Throbbing into him

Drinking and calming his frenzy

Then his venom seals her wound.

Saving her for yet

Another day

Another night

Another time

Until...

The novel enters the long slow time of Proust, of primal time, of eating and waiting and sleeping and dreaming and nightmares. The outside world recedes and its demands dissolve. 

Kenzaburo Oe: Every time you stand at a crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you...(A Personal Matter)

Oe on captivity and confinement in Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids: 

Nonetheless, for aliens like captured wild beasts to be safe before others watching them, it is best to lead the will-less existence of a stone, flower or tree:a purely observed existence. (22)

A dissertation of Marguerite Duras's work at the University of Helsinki:

Sirkka Knuuttila

Fictionalising Trauma

The Aesthetics of Marguerite Duras’s India Cycle