Britanons

By "angry" I mean something which pays tribute to the Angry Young Men of the 1950s.

Unfortunately existentialism in the traditionally French sense doesn't really work here (afaik) and due to the class system any book hoping to reach a mass audience necessarily has to be somewhat "angry" and uncouth. That's not say it should be written in Scots dialect, but it needs to be blunt in a way literary fiction struggles to be. Maybe I'm just revealing how low-brow I am, but still.

hi Aussie here, is Ian McEwan's Saturday worth reading?

Haven't read Barnes, but he seems insufferable. McEwan has always written with gloves on his hands, and Amis just churns out second-rate Kingsley garbage for his pale in London. The class system is great on the hand because it allows cute little villages in Dorset to exist and cute little gentlemen and young ladies to gawk at, but the shite they produce can be atrocious.

Great post. The public school / upper class issue is definitely the most important in Britain, far more than it is in Norway where Knausgaard for example never once mentions is, nor in France where elitism as far as I can tell has more to do with cultural snobbery (good) than how much daddy makes in the City.

Graham Greene was a posho, but his work was alright. Betjeman was a posho, but his work was alright. Etc. There's plenty there to be admired and even people like Larkin (grammar school, scholarship to Oxford) was pretty elitist and for good reasons.

The divide between working class and upper class is such that to "make a name for yourself" in London publishing you either need to be a wog, a paki, a degenerate or some kind of disabled transkin, OR to write some novel in dialect about how shit it is to be working class (drugs, rape, violence, patriarchal tyranny etc). As far as I can tell there's little in-between these days.

Houellebecq for example was raised working class but attended boarding school on a scholarship and then made friends with Elite kids in university, and stayed in those circles. But his novels can risk being hostile towards French equivalent of the Chavs, ethnic minorities, women etc because he can't be said to be writing that way from class snobbery, whereas if Quentin Thomas-Henshelwood who attended Marlborough College and then Oxbridge wrote a sociological book like Houellebecq he'd be (rightly) dismissed as an out-of-touch wanker.

The question therefore is: how can the working class / lower middle-class intellectual write in a way which both gets past the old guard in London but also appeals to readers everywhere but London?

It's like trying to get an article on holocaust revision in The Guardian.

Irish fiction is experiencing a golden age right now, and that's coming from the mouths of the writers themselves and not just the publishers, PRs etc.

God no. Dreadful book. Hard to pick out the worst bit. I can make a list
>main character is a hot shot brain surgeon who beats 15 years younger men at squash and fucks his beautiful wife twice a day
>his son is a hotshot blues guitarist
>his daughter is a hotshot poet
>there is a home invasion by some clichéd cockney villain characters for no real reason
>said home invasion is thwarted after the daughter reads the villains some of her poetry, which is so beautiful it makes them consider the error of their ways
This was the best reviewed novel of it's year, universal genuflection to what is apparently McEwans masterpiece

Do you seriously think BBC Radio 4 would published / broadcast a short story written by a white non-elite male about how shit it is to live around Pakis?

Guess the author was of the most recent short story broadcast on BBC Radio 4...

The answer: PIC FUCKING RELATED

Are you really?

I'm writing a book like that also. I'm submitting it anonymously (though with the usual cover letter etc) because I don't want to get blacklisted or worse.

One of my co-workers (~55 y.o. German male) is reading this right now and says (with his eyes closed) that it's "fantastic. Fan-tas-tic!"

I don't like McEwan in the same instinctive way I dislike The Mountain Goats, Jonathan Franzen, "foodies" and non-whites. The Child in Time is one of Knausgaard's favorite novels but it just did nothing at all for me. I could picture him writing it and thinking "ah, that's clever Ian!" while pushing out his obvious little symbolisms and metaphors. Disgusting. What's worse is that he's considered "edgy" because he wrote Cement Garden. Just goes to show what kind of people make up London publishing.

...

>"“He turns the corner into Paddington Street and stops in front of the open-air display of
fish on a steeply raked slab of with marble. He sees at a glance that everything he needs
is here. Such abundance from the emptying seas. On the tiled floor by the open doorway,
piled in two wooden crates like rusting industrial rejects, are the crabs and lobsters, and
in the tangle of warlike body parts there is discernible movement. On their pincers
they’re wearing funeral black bands. It’s fortunate for the fishmonger and his customers
that sea creatures have no voice. Otherwise there’d be howling from those crates. Even
the silence amount the softly stirring crowd is troubling. He turns his gaze away, towards
the bloodless white flesh, and eviscerated silver forms with their unaccusing stare, and
the deep-sea fish arranged in handy overlapping steaks of innocent pink, like cardboard
pages of a baby’s first book."

THIS is the kind of shit which makes you a famous, rich author in contemporary Britain.

>middlebrow bashing ITT

birdsong is unironically one of my favourite books and you can all fight me

>a short story written by a white non-elite male about how shit it is to live around Pakis?

sounds boring as fuck. listening fat english wankers moaning is pretty tedious.

it really is. there's some decent stuff getting written in scotland and wales also.... England's letting the side down again.

>op thinks he's british

what does that even mean?

embarrassing

We are fucked. Look at the fucking state of the people in the bbc, famous publishers, media. What do you fucking think I'll say about them? Of course I know you can't call out the leftists on here so I'll say nothing.

Tbh, I don't even like a lot of older British books so I wouldn't say I'm a huge British novel reader

You missed the bit where he cooks the fish, and McEwan notes approvingly that this makes him better than other, less middle class people, who don't buy their fish from proper fishmongers or cook them in such a sophisticated manner.
I first I thought Saturday was some sort of satire of bourgeois complacency, but you slowly realise McEwan means it.

>Scotland and Wales

Any recs?

>listening fat english wankers moaning is pretty tedious.

Not that I'm having a go at you but you're raising the problem indirectly. The idea was proposed and you instantly formed an image in your mind about the type of people who'd write or feature in it. It's as if we don't believe ordinary people can have ordinary problems. Sometimes I think we're actually worse than Americans for falling back on cultural stereotypes.

nah mate, read richard flanagan and tim winton. There's been no decent english fiction written since the 1980's

>richard flanagan and tim winton
hello boomer...

>Of course I know you can't call out the leftists on here so I'll say nothing.

Don't be such a senstive susan. 4chin is hardly a hotbed of leftist sympathy, you spastic.
I honest;y can't work out if you're trolling or just have a massive persecution complex.
Did a "paki" shag your mum?

Who is even "moved" by such boring, pedantic lectures like that? You should never drag obvious political or moral arguments into a book, e.g. "FISH GOT FEELINGS HOW VERY WELL DARE YOU NOT FEEL SADDENED UPON PASSING IN A MOST FLANEURISTIC MANNER A FISHMONGERY IN WHICH OUR SEA BROTHERS ARE SUFFERING!??"

It's tacky low-brow Guardian-tier journalism. Moralizing is for fags.

Houellebecq did it ok in Atomised. Haunting sequences.

Wellbeck has some sense of a moral philosophy rather than snobbery and self satisfaction disguised as morality

Of course i believe English people can have ordinary problems...they just express them is such an utterly tedious and limited manner that isn't conducive to writing good long-form fiction. But if anyone points this out to you you will cop-out of acknowledging this and instead use the hollow-man of structural prejudice against muh white males inherent in the liberal elites who dominates publishing as an explanation.

The literature world stopped being interested in the plight of your normal jack the lad in the 80's as they're a fucking boring, limited caricatures that were flogged to death in leftist kitchen sink and state of the nation fiction of the 50's-70's.

Write your self-aggrandising, self-pitying diatribe and self-publish it, you relentless twat. Then who you going to blame when nobody gives a fuck about your 2 dimensional drivel.

Seriously tho, what is it with English men and the peculiar mixture of self-aggrandisement and self pity? When you think about it's a deeply contradictory national character trait.

>"you will NEVER understand the chip on my shoulder, because its BIGGER than you are!!!"

True but Houellebecq would never, ever pretend as though he cared about the fate of fish. It just goes to show how little McEwan has suffered.

Houellebecq is very moralistic and employs two strategies to get his point across, in a very blunt way that some deem unliterary because he can't be fucked to convince by means of flowery writing:

1. General sociological observations, e.g. "women seek careers instead of family, average men can't catch a break any more, etc.

2. Writing about extreme examples or potentially extreme end-points of certain observable social trends, e.g. the worship of youth and individualism turning a mediocre young hedonist into a failed rock-star who films snuff films etc.

He's one of my favorite writers precisely because he'd be more likely to be writing in the comments section of The Guardian than in the Guardian itself.

He doesn't fake anything. He may present his worldview in a straightforward manner (which draws criticism) but it's never a point of view he adopts for the sake of being "nice" or the point of view held by a man who has spent his life being patted on the head for being a good little middle-brow cuck.

I'm posting on Veeky Forums you Billy nomates sadcase. I bet you don't even go down the pub with the ladz and have bantz and shag fit slagz. Softcunt

jokes on you. I'm your dad

It's the same with Philip Larkin, Pessoa, and other writers who are obviously elitist but aren't so detached as to think themselves "above" the mass of people who they spend so much time around and realize are more nuanced and interesting than as mere stock characters to be dragged on-stage for a couple of laughs. In my opinion the best writers tend to be elitist and rather narcissistic individuals who are forced by circumstance to spent much of their lives among the lower orders. They are then plagued internally by a desire to transcend their lowly state and not give in to the temptation to be a crude Orwell-esque prole, but also realize that these people often have a sense of humour and outlook which is far wiser, more practical, less bullshit-y than someone who's had it easy and writes about life from the outside. That's not to say these writers aren't outsiders, but their situation is such that they can really only be outsiders, so frustrated are they with every route open to them. Their solution to their dilemma is to escape inside themselves and to sink so deeply that they become distinct individuals who can't be placed anywhere and as a result have the capacity to represent everyone. And I say that as a virgin.

>leftist kitchen sink

That's a dumb way of looking at it. They were by no means leftie wankers through-and-through. The nuance is what made them so popular among the masses.

I'm not going to engage with your further because you're being too emotional about this.

>more nuanced and interesting than as mere stock characters to be dragged on-stage for a couple of laughs.
Amis is the worst for this. Like Guy Ritchie wrote a book

Read the cement garden instead

British people are raised to believe that they are living in the best of all possible worlds, that their country is globally and historically unique in its power, glory etc. The outside world's image of Britain often corresponds to scenes from Harry Potter or Pride & Prejudice. And yes, the reality is absolutely fucking bleak. And the standards are very low. It's the reason why Britain is probably the only country on earth where sports fans will compete in making their own hometown seem like the biggest shithole. Britain is a Millwall mentality write large, i.e. "It's shit, but it's MY shit". The upper class sit most Jewishly of course above all of this and live their own lives of immense wealth, comfy little boarding schools, careers in the City, a dozen weddings in Hampshire every summer, old school ties, etc. It's very predictable. But the beating heart of the country is a 47-year-old divorcee in Hull whose primary reaction to most things he experiences with "oh, piss off". We're a nation of miserable eccentrics, wallowing in our disdain for anything that strikes us as false or optimistic. It's why we're top of the world in a lot of things despite our small size. Our inflated sense of self-worth is confronted at birth by scenes of absolute misery and tedium (terraced housing, shit schools, grey weather, ugly chavs, endless rain, etc) and our tendency therefore is to sperg out and go overboard in attempting to try and make reality meet the same standards we've set for ourselves, learning the hard way that this isn't the way the world works and retreating therefore into bitter humour, a wary worldview and a vicious defence of the underdog.

Funny, I actually wrote "(as with Amis)" but deleted it.

And yes he has nothing to say. He knows how easy he has it, and hasn't worked hard to get where he is. That's a rather ad hominem attack I know, but his writing reminds me of Will Self's journalism: flaccid, cheap, contented and serving absolutely no purpose now that the author has exhausted everything he could potentially "have to say", which of course turns out to be not very much.

Anybody here read any books by the "Brutalists"?

They looked pretty interesting but disbanded a few years back apparently

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalists

Oh don't let's get started on Self. Another posh boy who did a bit of slumming it in his youth and is still dining out on the story. None of them have that understanding of people that makes a great writer.
When Balzac writes about some lower class landlady he understands what makes her tick, why she does the things she does, her hopes and fears. Self or Amis would use her to make some cheap dig (later to be described as 'screamingly funny' by some critic)

Brit/lit/ general when?

"the working class" is a marxist invention. You simply cannot write about the average joe without it being infused with leftist discourse.

I started out level headed then got fired up.

Anyone ever thought about writing "A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" type book but set in contemporary sunderland, bolton or somewhere like that?

Yeah the "I was a streetsweeper (for a week) and then (((blagged))) my way to becoming the editor of a cultural magazine" story is a bit nauseating. I think he's actually quite a sinister person. His repeated, un-nuanced attacks on white people while also touting himself to be some kind of Corbyn of the cultural world is absolutely pathetic.

One thing I try to ask myself when I read a writer is: could he have written The Book of Disquiet.

Usually the answer is no, because that book to me represents the human form stripped of all pretension, detached from any subjective value system, and wanting only to acquaint itself with a few quiet, private truths.

Self's prose is atrocious for similar reasons Amis often sucks. There's no focus on the individual sentence, because there's no pressure to do that. Instead it's one big "Aren't I clever!"-fest where humour is usually at the expense of someone who the author doesn't even take the time to turn into a real someone.

I'd bump it lad.

I've recently thought about writing a book like that but with each story / chapter about the patriarch of one family across generations. Their different jobs, expectations in life, social context, relationship with women, etc ., starting with some over-worked manual labourer thankful for the crumbs he's handed and ending with a contemporary young man in the same region, rather than in POAA which is one man over a lifetime. But I can't be fucked tbqh.

Why are you thinking about writing one?

>Patriarch of one family

What I mean of course is the male bloodline of one family, ending of course with the modern man who dunnae get to breed.

de-industrialisation is not a problem of "LE WHITE MALE" but a problem for the whole working class. What the fuck you are talking about

I'll make one when I'm not so busy lad, no seppo's allowed

>he hasn't read Ballard's 21st century novels

Your idea reminds me of a play called The Kentucky Cycle

>You should never drag obvious political or moral arguments into a book
t. illiterate

Nice rec. How'd you hear about that?

Are you under the impression that non-whites in Britain matter or are worth discussing to any extent beyond what will be required to remove them?

Why do so many current bourgeoisie affect this faux proletarian stuff, while at the same time completely pissing on the working class every chance they get. Ms penny does it too.
>tee hee, I'm totally not a cosseted middle class person, I've seen the rough side of life, and lived!
>the poor are idiotic racist scumbags who threaten everything I stand for

I'm getting a story published about a group of far right nationalists, in an undisclosed town in the north-east., who absent-mindedly fall into exploiting young vulnerable girls to fulfil their abhorrent sexual desires (fuelled by sexual frustration as they cannot get a girlfriend and over exposure to depraved, normalising internet shit holes like Veeky Forums). Basically its an analogy for brexit whereby a bunch of bitter, inadequate dumb-fucks literally shaft the younger population. Also its a bit of a role reversal for the whole rochedale thing which is fun to write.

I'm only here doing research.

Shit's cash in that I'm actually making bank off this

This is so fucking stupid. There is nothing wrong with brexit. If you don't agree you are a blairite piece of shit

have you ever frequented brit-chav/slag threads on /b/, /r9k/, /pol/ or /tv/?
How do they make you feel?

There have been no good British writers since the Romantics. I unironically think all the creative Englishmen moved to America

I agree, fellow Angolo saxon

the main characters playfully refer to each other as "cuck" "soyboy" "bleedin' paki" and so in in a laddish, jovial manner.

I read it in my high school drama class.

Your idea sounds good, I would read it. Like a '100 years of solitude' for England but less magical realism and more naturalist. I'd be wary about about getting too much like Houllebecq in the contemporary sections. Not that I think Houllebecq isn't right, but I'm concerned about the thought of too much art like his being made, not necessarily for the sake of society but for the sake of the artist. I think it's an understandable reaction, since contemporary society has overdosed on positivity to the point where it has created burnout. But it's too easy to get to the point where it's just a reaction to societal attitudes and the bitterness only serves to make what could be a truly transcendent vision worse. I don't blame Houllebecq or similar artists though, I like their work and it really does feel like there's no way out at times.

Whenever I think about what art should be made in the contemporary era, I'm reminded of something the filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki once said. He's a very 'blackpilled' thinker, maybe not in the r9k sense but in how he's disgusted with how fake and shallow modern life is and is aware of the fact that the vast majority of children will simply go on to be crushed by the machinations of mass society, all beauty and human soul erased. Anyway, he said that his film 'Ponyo' is his response to the afflictions and uncertainties of our times. I found that an incredibly interesting statement, because what is Ponyo? It's a film about a little boy and a little girl, innocent childhood love, responsibility to others, the ocean, and the elemental aspects of life, and he combines these together with the utmost grace of simplicity, from a child's perspective. It's feels like it was made with a child's vision, their horizon, their possibilities, it's all there. It's genuinely magical and transcendent in an organic way. It's not fake childness and optimism in the way Disney and Pixar movies are, it's not an adult imposition, it reminds me of other great children's books I've been rereading recently like The Wind in the Willows and Winnie-the-Pooh and The Hobbit and Tom's Midnight Garden. Anyway, whenever I think about what art I'd like to make I'm reminded that no matter how much of a depressive misanthrope Miyazaki is, and he definitely vents that out in some of his other works, he said that Ponyo was his response to society and the problems that face us. It's just too pure, it makes me feel like Holden at the end of The Catcher in the Rye, makes me want to cry, we're all powerless but maybe we can create something beautiful, and if not for adults then children who can understand it.

Sorry I don't really know what I'm trying to say, and it's probably irrelevant to your story idea and Im not even british but I'm not going to delete this post now.

So many people in this country suffer from the J.K Rowling school of thought, where they slam entire concepts under ill-defined Goods and Evils (Usually conflated with Being Nice)

This reflects on literature, where if you want to sell or get featured on This Morning it better fucking appeal to the sensibilities of a 35-59 year old woman.

Interesting point and perspective, honestly. I appreciate you articulating yourself. I haven't seen Ponyo but I want to now. It's funny that you mentioned Wind in the Willows and Winnie-the-Pooh also, because both writers were to varying degrees members of the "London in crowd", which shows why the class argument here in the UK isn't black-and-white. And I agree about the idea of not simply wallowing in despair, futility and so on and simply pointing at things and saying how terrible they are. An alternative should always be proposed in such cases. Houellebecq does to be fair suggest things like love, tenderness, family and so on are desirable and a potential antidote to atomism etc, but it can be overshadowed by his bleakness, which probably could only be written about in the context of Western Europe, or maybe just France even.

Ponyo doesn't look like anime in the strictest sense, but I believe one of the reasons so many young people today enjoy anime is that it is in some way the modern equivalent of the coming-of-age movies in 1980s America, where the nerdy, well-meaning, shy kid overcomes the odds and gets the girl, aces the test, or learns some valuable lesson, all of this done in a fairly cartoon-like manner and an innocent environment (even the bullies are often converted by the end of the movie). I don't watch anime but it obviously values things like friendship, innocence, empathy, romance and the struggle to be good in an often corrupt world. Catcher in the Rye definitely covers all the bases in that respect, and it's success is I believe in part due to how subtle the story is. While many people "hate" Holden or find the "story" boring, it's actually a bildungsroman compressed into a story about a boy forced out of innocence (school) and thrown into an adult world he does not comprehend (New York). Certain images, like Holden not wanting to ruin a perfect scene by throwing a snowball, shows how delicate the story is. And also his hypocrisy (swearing a lot and rubbing out the F-word on the wall of his sister's school) shows that certain weaknesses or failure are inevitable, and that childhood itself isn't an ideal state, though many of its features should be protected at all costs.

Are you writing anything at the moment?

Also, you may like this story: newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/05/good-people

I wouldn't ever mention Veeky Forums in my writing, might be hard for you to avoid though

im going to call it something else incase moot mk2 sues me.

suggestions are welcome

It's WANK

>main character is a hot shot brain surgeon who beats 15 years younger men at squash and fucks his beautiful wife twice a day

I hate adultery so much. But I guess that's my working class background showing through.

are you that user who was complaining about bleak British towns a month or so ago? About Scunthorpe Utd vs Yeoville on a wet Wednesday evening? About the bleak existence of someone working in a peripheral new build "business enterprise park" and living in a UKIP suburban hellhole?

Can you please write a book user? I'd read it.

Wow fuck. You've made me post this Louis-Ferdinand Céline excerpt (again).

This is not entirely their fault... the fault of these great writers... Since childhood, since the cradle true to speak, they have devoted themselves to imposture, to pretension, to rationalization, and to plagiarism... Starting at the school-desk, they began to lie, to pretend that that which they read, they had personally lived... To consider this "read" emotion, this second-hand emotion, as their personal emotion! All of the bourgeois writers are at bottom impostors! swindlers in experience and emotion... They began their existences upon footings of imposture... they are following through... they made their debuts in life by way of an imposture... and the original protected environment is the "High School"... This seminary of Freemasonry, this incubator of every privilege, every treachery, every symbol. Those who have felt themselves superior, nobles "called" to a special station, ever since they were six years old... An emotional world, an entire life, for one's entire life, separates the grammar school graduates from those of the high school... The former are equally well- grounded, from the very beginning, in the world of experience, while the others are a bunch of big jokers... Their experience doesn't come until much later, by way of high station, as lords, as impostors... even Valles. They had taken the route to school by car, while the grammar school kids went by bike... the first had seen the route, while the others had memorized the route, doggedly, subduing it step-by- step... A man is completely made, emotionally so to speak, by the time he's about twelve years old. Thenceforth all he does is to go through repetitions, which is too bad! all the way through 'til death... His music is fixed once and for all. ..within his very flesh, as upon a photograph, on its first printing... It's that first printing that counts. The childhood of bourgeois children is the childhood of parasites and louts, having the sensibilities of parasites, of sensualists, of a privileged caste on the defensive, of little darlings, affected, artificial, with a vicious emotional dislocation lasting unto death... They have never really seen any thing... they never will see any thing... humanly speaking... They'll have acquired their experiences through the Greek translations, and learned about life through the Latin versions and the chattering of M. Alain... It's as though a recruit were trained to sit in the saddle wrongly, mounting with his balls towards the rear, and were to go on doing so throughout the remainder of his service... all of these little bourgeois products are doomed from the outset, emotionally perverted, desiccated, withered, affected, and decomposed, from the beginning, Renan included...

They will only "think" their way through life... never "testing" themselves, not even in war... in their vile "precious" flesh, those sly show-offs... Humdrum, sclerotic, unctuous, embourgeoisified, overly-elevated and whining, beginning with their very first compositions. Throughout their entire lives, they'll retain a poker up their asses, and Latin pomposity on their tongues... They enter into secondary school like little Chinese girls with feet to be bound, and they'll emerge from it emotionally monstrous, amputated, sadistic, frigid, frivolous, and crafty... They will no longer understand anything but the grammatical tortures, of exchanging syntaxes and adverbs one with another, across the stumps... Never will they see anything... They will never have seen anything... Aside from the formalistic tortures and the scruples of rhetoricians, they will remain forcefully closed-off, impermeable to the waves of life. The parents and masters have dedicated them, beginning in high school, that is to say forever, to the simulacra of emotion, to all of the spiritual charades, to sentimental impostures, to word play, to equivocating incantations... They will remain set-up, penetrated, blissfully unaware of having been pilfered, rigidly pedantic in every fiber of their being, convinced, exultant in their superiority, babbling their Latino-gibberish, blown-away into that Greco-Roman emptiness, with their buffoonish "humanity," their false humility, their fantastically serendipitous second-handedness, pretentiously cooing formulae, and shaking the tambourine of axioms, all of which has been proffered and held high throughout the ages, in order to justify the stultification of the young by the most parasitic, phrase-mongering, sly, irredentist, politicized, profiteering, inexterminable, incompetent, eunuchoid, wormishly theoretical, disaster-creating clique in the Universe: the
Stupid Teachers' Brigade...

The worship of the Greeks, the Latin versions, the pretentious, tendentious and Judaized twaddle by Alain, and the MultiBendas . . .will always be correct in the mind of the graduate as opposed to direct experience and direct emotion, with which the simple life and direct living, with all of its personal risks, abounds... The "amenability" of the high-schooler becomes inverted, once he leaves the "sixth grade," and this is a much more serious matter than are the first wankings and inversions of the "onion"... Life is an immense bazaar in which the bourgeois enter, circulate, help themselves... and leave without paying... only the poor pay... the little bell of the cash drawer... that is the bourgeois emotion... The bourgeois, including the little bourgeois children, have never had any need to go by the cashier... They have never had emotion... Direct emotion, direct anguish, direct poetry, inflicted by conditions upon the poor of this Earth, beginning with the very first years of life. . . They have never felt anything other than high schoolish emotions, bookish or familial emotions, and then later in life, some "distinguished" emotions... that is, "artistic" emotions... Nothing upon which they subsequently elaborate in the course of their "works," can be anything other than a patchwork of reprints, of things seen through a windshield or a buffer... or simply stolen from the depths of the library... translated, tinkered with, and rearranged, from the Greek, or from classical motifs. Never, absolutely never, any direct humanity. Only phonographs. They have been neutered of any direct emotion, sworn to eternal chattering from the very first hours of childhood... just as the Jews are circumcised, and sworn to vengeance... All of this is biological, implacable, nothing left to say. The combined destinies of bourgeois Aryan children and Jewish children, almost always brought into association, engendered, and given cover by their families, school and education, consists above all in being desensitized, humanly speaking. It is above all a matter of turning them into cheats, impostors, ham actors, the privileged, the socially frigid, and artists at "dissembly"...

The finely French French language, "clean-shaven," is marvelously adapted towards these ends. It's actually the absolutely indispensable corset for these little emotional geldings, sustaining them, reassuring them, doping them up, and furnishing them for every circumstance all of the charades of imposture, and that "gravitas" which they so desperately need, for fear of foundering... Not only is the fine style "relevant," but it also contains a miracle! in that it equips all of these impostors, all of these frigid and rapacious types!... It provides them with a providential vehicle, an exact, balanced, and meticulous language, in which you have an impeccable shelter for their vapidity, a hermetic for all things insignificant. It's a rigid framework of a "style," an imposture without which they would find themselves literally denuded, blown away instantaneously by the brutality of life, having in themselves no sort of substance, no sort of specific quality... not the least weight, the least gravity... But in that proud classical corset, completely reinforced with formulae, excerpts and references, they can still play their roles, and how! the most monumental roles in the social farce... so wondrously fruitful for these eunuchs. It's always the fake, the tacky, the wretched and imitative trash that winds up being imposed upon the masses, the lie always! authenticity never... From that point on, it's all over! The issue has been decided... This is the "French" of the high school, the titrated and filtered "French," the all-cleaned-up French, the frigid French, the rubbed-smooth (modernized Naturalist) French, the loutish French, the French of Montaigne and Racine, the Jewish French for secondary school examination essays on Anatole Jew,'" the Goncourt French, the disgustingly elegant, closely-molded, oriental, unctuous French, slick as a turd, perhaps the very epitaph for the French race. It's like the Mandarin form of Chinese. It no longer takes any real emotion in order to express oneself in "high school" French, any more so than in Mandarin Chinese... It is enough just to pretend.

It's the ideal French for Robots. The ideally, truly cleaned-up Human, about whom all of the literary artists nowadays seemingly want to write, is a robot. Any Robot, let us note, can be rendered as brilliant, as shiny, as rationalized, and as streamlined, with "clean lines," as is desired, as well as most perfectly elegant, according to the tastes of the day. The Robot is destined to become the centerpiece of the Palace of Discovery... It is he who is the end-all and be-all of so much civilizing "rationalistic" effort... admirably Naturalistic and objective (the Robot occasionally becomes intoxicated, however! the sole human trait of the Robot at this time)... Ever since the Renaissance there has been this tendency to work with ever- increasing enthusiasm towards the advent of the Kingdom of the Sciences and the Social robot. The most reductionist... the most objective of languages is the journalistically perfect one to fill in as the objective language of the Robot... We are already there... It's no longer necessary to maintain a soul in opposition to the reality of death, in order to express oneself humanistically... And how many volumes! how many aspects! how many facets! and what a lot of publicity! ...any sort of robotic jabber whatever can be a triumph! We are already there...

>Classical education is bad mkay
Honestly I don't even disagree.

All of those writers who are vaunted before me, and whom I am supposed to admire... will never, it's quite evident, feel the least little inkling of direct emotion. They will continue working in the manner of "surveyors" up to a moment to come very soon, whereupon they will cease working as anything other than surveyors... Perhaps at the final moment, at the moment of death, they might feel some wee little authentic emotion, some little tinge of doubt... Nothing could be less certain... The style of smooth neoclassicism for which they are famous, that shining breastplate,'" beveled and adjusted with exactitude, without pity, impeccable, and having girded them against any intrusion by life ever since high school, forbids them now as much as ever from allowing anything whatever to penetrate to the insides of their carcasses, under penalty of being immediately dissolved, and reabsorbed by the waves of life... The least little contact with the human emotional torrent, and it's death! ...this time, without any phrases... They move about beneath the current, as in the depths of too deep a river, under an enormous weight of mutely treacherous caresses, in diving suits, out of sorts, inhibited by a hundred thousand precautions. They don't communicate with the outside world save by microphones directed towards the surface. They pontificate in their impeccable "public" style, towards and against everything, those acrobatic, soothsaying cuckolds... They grew up with their breastplates... They will die with their breastplates, inside of their breastplates, embraced, swaddled, and trussed to the peak of perfection, wavy-haired, spice cake, polished, shining robots, crawling about in diving suits under an enormous paraphernalia, inhibited by ten thousand tubes and wires to the point of being almost immobile, practically blind, feeling their way along, they crawl thusly towards that pretty light at the end of the tunnel of their existences, at the end of the shadowy depths. . . Retirement... No thing emanates from the fissures of their armor, from the joints of these "elite" robots, than a little spray, ephemeral bouquets, of infinitely microscopic gurghngs, the bubbles of which rise, to the open air. One will never have to congratulate them for tearing apart their extraordinary metaUic yoke, in light of the fact that they will have to die one day anyway. Such a reahzation to the contrary usually only succeeds in making them secure their harnesses even more tightly than formerly, into even more opulent bridles, embroil themselves with even more overbearing "cultural" appurtenances, and then maintain while going into their shadowy depths, despite everything, the possibility of some sort of slight gesticulation... contrived schemes, light-hearted sleights-of-hand, and equivocating hesitations, all known as "stylistic finesse."

Once they've returned to their "cozy little rooms," enhanced with chamomile, they are seized with anguish, for a long time, a very long time, strangled, livid, obsessed by the memory of those infinite murky waters, those abysses. These they depict with a distraught hesitation, along with all of those monsters that they'd glimpsed... those other monsters... They are always very poorly revealed... very bruised, very painful... under the caresses of the light, of those tragic boy scout handlings, of their reductions to their causes. Therefore they must be "worked out" most laboriously, gut-wrenchingly, so as eventually to dissipate all of their fears, and to cradle them, so that they will finally take to paper, depose themselves, and adhere, black, soft and warm, on white... All of that affection ever so attentive, ever so vigilant, of a family looking out for one another until their diarrhea goes away, and their toothaches are appeased... Their very greatest Love of loves being but that redundance of nothingness, their great ear-piece to the hollow soul. How is it that all of these castrati have come forth to plague us with their novels? with their simulacra of emotions? Let it be said once and for all that they are opaque, blind, deaf, and one-armed! Don't they fit the description perfectly, when it's said that they merely parrot and patch-together that which they've read in other books?... Aren't they conducting their careers strictly within the confines of a droll "Baedekerism,"'" a descriptive Goncourtism, a thoroughgoing objectivist rummaging, a Zolaism for '37, even more scientifico-Judeolatrous, Dreyfusian, and liberationist, into the most microscopic analysis of the ass-reamings of Poo-Proust, of "mounting nuance" unto half a quarter of the ass of a fly? or more simply still, furious with constipation, which only makes them more obstinate, to the relentless sawing of wood, regardless of the weather, of a few cords, every day after lunch, and then in the middle of the night?

Their fatal and robotic insensibility condemns them all, once and for all, to rigid estimations, to descriptions, to overviews of sentiment, to grimaces, to collective movements, to brochures in the interests of tourism, to captions for photographs, to subtitles and inserts for advertising, to programs for events... Aside from that, they're screwed. They can't take the risk of mixing themselves up in the least little reproduction of emotion, for fear of committing atrocious gaffes. We're embarrassed just looking at them, quavering, floundering about as soon as they venture into the very least expressions of sentiment, even the most natural and elementary, making of it an abjectly disheartening catastrophe. Indecent, rude, and refractory, they immediately bury themselves beneath an avalanche of oafishness and obscenity. Upon inciting the very least sentimentality they inflate and explode into a thousand infinitely fetid pieces of excrement. It's nothing but a thicket of refuge for all of the robots supersaturated with objectivism.'" Surrealism. In it, there is no longer anything to fear! No sort of emotivity is necessary. Anyone who wants can take refuge therein, and proclaim himself a genius! No matter which castrato, no matter which inverted Kike in a delirium of imposture, can make his own way to the top. There only has to be a little understanding, very easily concluded with the critics, that is to say amongst the Jews... "My grandmother in the stratosphere hunts for M. Picard's connecting rods. The little fish at the Exposition are thinking of the war. . .the ones in the Seine are being quiet. . .sea-sickness. . . I will not be going to America. . .eels. . .munitions. . .my forty-two aunts. . ."

An admirable Jewish trick!... The empty hype of the Jewish critics!... At a single stroke above all judgment! ...superior to all points of reference! ...to all humanistic texts... And the more emasculated, impotent, sterile, pretentious and farcical it is, the more of a bore and a poor impostor it is, the more forceful will be its effrontery, and the more genius and fantastic success it will have... (with Jewish publicity "on command," you understand). Admirably simple! presto!... The Renaissance splendidly paved the way, through its Judaic fanaticism and its worship of the pre-scientific, for this stinking evolution towards all things seamy. This catastrophic promotion of all the world's castrati into the Kingdom of the Arts... As a cultural manifestation of the boys from the Freemasonic laboratories, and as claptrap even more bound-up, more constricted than Positivism, naturalism has since the Renaissance carried forth the same gigantic stupidities, the same calamitous prejudice in favor of the ultimate power of vapidity. This trick has not fallen on a deaf Jewish ear. . .

Sterile, conceited, destructive, swinish, and monstrously megalomaniacal, the Jews are currently accomplishing, to full capacity, and under the same standard as their conquest of the world, the degradation, the monstrous crushing, and the systematic and total annihilation of our most natural emotions as conveyed in all of our essential, instinctive arts, in music, painting, poetry, theater... Replacing Aryan emotion with the Nigger's tom-tom.

Surrealism, an extension of naturalism, is art for hateful robots, an instrument of Jewish despotism, swindle and imposture... As an extension of imbecilic naturalism, and as the rod and pruning shears of the Jewish eunuchs, surrealism is the registry of our emotional disenfranchisement...the ground for our hecatomb, our communal mass grave for idolatrous Aryan cretins, duped and cuckolded on a cosmic scale... And then it's an entirely done deal! admirably done... for mugs like us!... At surrealism's door, long quivering with impatience, with reductionism, and with objectivism, to all of its degrees, all or nearly all of our great writers ceaselessly hone themselves down to the infinitesimal, to the loss of that "jingling bell," to the loss of the very last bit of substance. Were they to continue to handle themselves somewhat badly, were they to apply themselves to fantasy, were they to be drawn into idealism or romanticism, there are those who would immediately and fatally so smooth them out, after so many analyses, as to put them on their way towards surrealism... That is to say those who are promoted, well positioned, and delirious with impunity, in the most astounding imposture of the age, whose aim is the stupefaction of the people and the bourgeoisie... by way of the amassing of meaningless frenzies, parasymbolic simulacra, and frenetic fraudulent wanking... All of these are jingling bells as well! ...jingling bells! ...not even real bells! but vile little jingling bells! for rabid little beasts!

Every time, whenever it' s a matter of whether it'll move to a greater or lesser extent. . .it goes... out of it come some odd little noises, some hail-like tintinnabulations, some little false notes. And then there's only so much of it, and then it's all over... The surrealist invasion, I've found, is absolutely ready, and it's going to proceed without hesitation, by virtue of the law of numbers... Therefore there remains nothing left to be said about Robotic art, before it swoops in to stay.

The standard-bearers of high culture, those works continuing in the classical tradition, at some point become deformed, due to stylistic constipation, and a certain degree of weakening brought about by internal friction, gratuitous wanking, pointless buffoonery, the transmutation of unworthy bladders, and the shopworn quality of certain symbols fallen into desuetude, and rendered turgid with certain jaded hypertonics and bubbling banalities, all of which come together to lie upon all of the straw mattresses in all of the lofts of the grand official Jewish whorehouse!... They all come from the same vessel, the same infinite glass... of Goncourtian meaninglessness, of the slatternly recasting of Zola, from the same overused dishwater, from the same plunging into things squishy, opaque, suspect, and Medusa-like!...

Perhaps my taste is poorly developed, but in my humble opinion, I've ultimately come to find that Monsieur Duhamel's chattering works serve admirably as continuations of those of M. Theurier...his powers of edification, coming from the House of Bordeaux, Bazin, cousin Bourget, and son Mauriac, might admirably substitute for M. Gide when it comes to the weaving of cocoons. The "complicated babies of Goncourt" might yet take all of the critical acclaim and all of the prizes, it being enough simply to make the effort to "Freudianize" them a little... M. Giraudoux, as a most pertinent fact, polishes while putting out, just as much as Poo-Proust did. M. Paul of the Cemeteries Valery makes his appearance, pecks about a bit, disappears into the waves, Baedeker-like, consensualizing, surrealizing if he must as a Roman... reappearing along one bow as Maurras, coming back as Barres, losing himself again, now Bergsonized, irritated, taunting us with little nothings... And finally M. Maurois, who is by no means anything like du Gard, but even so, Vautel seriously quite makes us forget them all... over the course of several months erasing them completely. . .he alone might be enough for the entire Jewish future. Why not?. . .

The problem could probably expand to a lot of european countries. People seem to love houellebecq on Veeky Forums but he's now almost an old guy, and even in France nobody really wrote with this cold and despaired tone since (to my knowledge). plus his clinical/cynical approach of society isn't maybe the best way to create smth new inour times. The temptation to go on a post-modern apocalyptical descrition of reality during 250 pages is just becoming a new dogma (vs the old stinking bourgeois writing of course). In France I know that some writers are trying to get into a "lowbrow" realism in a good way, but maybe we just need some new magic or fantasy. What about brit poetry ? Any good ?

I don't see anything among all these trinkets that might truly impassion us... that might revive so much as a single fly, a living fly, a fly that flies... the cause appears to me to be understood. Renaissance, naturalism, objectivism, surrealism, the perfect progression towards the Robotic. We are already there. As far as I'm concerned, everything is in admirable agreement. Baby rattles, childish games, Calvinists, "Vermouth" varnish. Baedekerisms, and an asshole. There's no way to bring the water in this vessel to a boil. Assorted groups of mixed lanterns, croutons of sweetened textbooks, Latin-book hair curlers, "Translation" chickens in "measure" sauce with the entire box of nuanced garnish. Meaninglessness raised to the ten thousandth power. A show, a fair of eunuchs dressed-up as dildoes, with a big strong-box, a lantern, a can, a bladder, more soakings, and shces of recircumcised prepuces! There's not one from among all of these vague motifs, these effronterous importunings, which has not been worked-over at least a hundred times and in all of its aspects, without ceremony, in vague high school recollections. All of these stories, these styles, these scenarios, these mannerisms are put into one' s head at school. . . Never occurring to a fellow in and of himself. They are nothing but so many alibis, so many parvenu pretexts, for the consolidation of careers, for irrational academic crazes, as ornamental knickknacks for wine cellars... Contemporary literature is a calamitous crumbling catafalque of phrases, acrostics and flub- dubs, so dry, so chapped, that not even the maggots come to swarm upon it any more, a cadaver with no tomorrow, lifeless, ghostly, an oozing without color and without horror, more disheartening, more repugnant, a thousand times more disappointing than the most rank, most stark, most bloated, most oozing carrion, a literature in sum more dead that death, infinitely.

He who does not wish to be negrified is a fascist to be hung.

That'll do for now I guess.
Go here for more archive.org/stream/TriflesForAMassacre/CELINEtrif_djvu.txt

I'd refer to it vaguely, like 'some image board' for eg

The "working class" doesn't need another patronising moral treatise where their "plight" is "sympathised with". If you want to write a worthwhile and cathartic novel, what you should do is forget all the class and political stuff, and write a novel from the perspective of an average British lad where all his habits, desires, aspirations, trials, sufferings, etc., are dealt with sincerely and for their own sake. Like, instead of giving pretentious commentary on how obsession with football or video games or whatever is a lack of culture and symptom of dysfunction, etc., treat these things as worthwhile in themselves. In other words, a psychological portrait rather than a sociological landscape. Find the humanity in the lad rather than using the lad as an occasion for a treatise on "humanity".

Are you a Jew?

You know, Houllebecq has always veiled himself in a fog of irony. He very intentionally blurs the line between his beliefs and his characters beliefs.
Please don't be one of the idiots that blindly thinks his world view is represented by his characters - you will miss the point of his books. He is not criticizing society, he explores society through the eyes of a character and adds a pinch of satire.

Fine, I'll step up to the plate and be the author England needs. Will write a novel about an old white man from Luton who becomes increasingly sad as he watches his community changing unrecognisably before his eyes

>I have a feeling that the culture is crying out for an "angry" novel about contemporary Britain from the perspective of a white male.

A British version of Taxi Driver.

I'm not Brit, but I am quite white and I live in the west. I have no known non-white ancestors. Anyhow, I do plan to write some books on the matter, and I have already written a book about the toxicity of the left. I love the title; 'The Delicious Addiction of Oppression and Outrage', and it goes into various subjects including fake hate crimes, the 'religion of peace', feminism, and just a bunch of stuff. Here's a link to it if you're curious. The cover rocks, in my opinion.

amazon.com/dp/B0785WFLQC

"The wage gap, racism against people of colour, discrimination against those of the Islamic faith, the glass ceiling, trans marginalization, the Men's Rights Movement... what does it all mean?"

Traditional working class doesn't exist anymore

Nah wot we need is a British version of Naked.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
A Kestrel for a Knave
Saved
Look Back in Anger
The Homecoming

No need to reinvent the wheel, lads.