Noctambulate

Simenon’s THE BURIAL OF MONSIEUR BOUVET is an elaboration on one of his most familiar “roman durs” plots, which he returns to like a reoccurring dream — a man picks up stakes and deserts his life, family, and social connections to build an alternate, often criminal existence.

“Their window was opened on the blue of the evening. All the windows of Paris were open. In some parts of town people slept on their balconies and throughout the night they could hear from every direction the whistles of the trains in the stations.” Simenon, THE BURIAL OF MONSIEUR BOUVET

THE BURIAL OF MONSIEUR BOUVET was written in 1950 while Simenon was staying in California (Carmel-by-the-Sea). Yet, as always, he carries the sounds and smells of Paris vividly in his head:

“It was the hour for aperitifs and all the little cafés of Paris smelled of anise.”

In Simenon’s THE BURIAL OF MONSIEUR BOUVET, the fifteen year old, already plotting his escape, despises a precious family photo album: “No one ever thinks of keeping a cemetery in the cupboard. Corpses on the first page! Corpses on the following pages! Then people who aren’t quite dead but almost.”

So decent and generous. Thanks for this tribute.

The old, dogged detective Beaupére in Simenon’s THE BURIAL OF MONSIEUR BOUVET: “That was enough for him. Now he could keep on walking about, go into little shops, into the loges of concierges, tenacious, asking his eternal questions, as impervious to rebuffs as a salesman for vacuum cleaners.”

The lozenge-sucking, flat-footed working class investigator in Simenon’s THE BURIAL OF MONSIEUR BOUVET is truly a pedestrian detective: walking nearly everywhere, avoiding taxis and even the Metro, doggedly asking questions of everyone he encounters.

“He didn’t blush because the blood never circulated hotly enough in his veins to reach the surface of his skin, but his lips trembled slightly.” In Simenon’s THE BURIAL OF MONSIEUR BOUVET, a self-consciously working class detective finds himself under interrogation by a reserved socialite.

In Simenon’s THE BURIAL OF MONSIEUR BOUVET, the corpse of the deceased loner seems to be playing a kind of private joke on his survivors: “the skin had become whiter, almost diaphanous and the vague smile that had hovered on his lips had grown more definite and become almost sarcastic.”

All serious historical novels are works of speculative fiction, even ones set in the ‘60s and ‘70s. These three are absolutely brilliant.

Howells’ A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES (1889) as a reverie of complex, polyglot America at the turn of the century. Basil and Isabel March exchange the social, economic, and cultural certainties of Boston for the lively, diverse roil of New York City’s streets and its perilous economic possibilities.

"We can't go back! There's no farm anymore to go back to. The fields is full of gas wells and oil wells and hell holes generally; the house is tore down, and the barn's goin'" The irreversible devastation wrought by monetary gain in William Dean Howells' A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

“The girl laughed. . . . Like everyone else, she was not merely a prevailing mood, as people are apt to be in books, but was an irregularly spheroidal character, with surfaces that caught the different lights of circumstance and reflected them.” William Dean Howells, A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

In William Dean Howells’ A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, New Yorkers have a wardrobe of multiple social personae: “By this time, Beaton was in possession of one of those other selves of which we have several about us, and was again the laconic, staccato, rather worldified young artist.”

Notably surreal hat and necklace combination . . .

“They forget death, Basil; they forget death in New York.” William Dean Howells, A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

Of the AI-like technical object in Qntm’s THERE IS NO ANTIMEMETICS DIVISION: “The whole thing, the entirety of human ideatic space is being torn apart. Everything becomes corrupted . . . Its malevolent gravity drags humanity and all human ideas into its orbit, warping them beyond recognition.”

A final containment strategy is outlined in In Qntm’s THERE IS NO ANTI-MEMETICS DIVISION:

“‘We could exterminate all intelligent human life,’ he says. “The Organization motto is ‘Freedom means No Fear.’ If there are no humans, there is no fear. Job done.’”

In Qntm’s THERE IS NO ANTI-MEMETICS DIVISION the top level of organizational secrecy is a “Vegas Room” (as in “whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”).

“But if we have learned nothing else, we have learned this: Humans can walk away from, and forget, anything. Civilization can get back to ‘normal’ after anything. . . . We will certainly never hold ourselves accountable.”

— Qntm (Sam Hughes) THERE IS NO ANTI-MEMETICS DIVISION

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

“We cannot look at enough of the world at once. There is an appallingly large percentage of the world that no human has ever properly looked at.” Qntm (Sam Hughes), THERE IS NO ANTIMEMETICS DIVISION

I have a lot of catching-up to do . . .

There’s a crisis in non-fiction book sales. What’s to blame? We’re buying 17 million fewer factual books than six years ago. Is the rise of podcasts to blame? Or publishers’ obsession with celebrities and influencers?

"We’re going to have to, as an industry, just make sure that they’re f***ing good." On the crisis in nonfiction publishing, and making sure this is actually cyclical and not indicative of something deeper.

“We need some memories from you. Memories that nobody else in the world has access to, and that are buried so deeply that we can’t extract them without killing you. So this afternoon, that’s what we’re going to do . . . ” In Qntm’s THERE IS NO ANTIMEMETICS DIVISION, a retiree’s terminal assignment.

Qntm’s ‘Antimemetics’ as a new gothic: “You can look directly at one but you’ll still perceive nothing there. Dreams you can’t hold on to and secrets you can never share . . . a conceptual ecosystem of ideas consuming other ideas and segments of reality.” THERE IS NO ANTIMEMTICS DIVISION

“Every airport, I now know, has a light side and a dark side.”

Le Carré’s THE MISSION SONG develops (appropriate for our moment) as a story of de-naturalization, rendition, open-ended detention. “What law?,” remarks the Home Office official. “There isn’t one, Not for him.”

In Le Carré’s THE MISSION SONG, an unsuccessful plea to a ruthlessly blasé British press lord to prevent a planned military coup: “Thorne’s bloodshot eyes examined me in contemptuous disbelief: ‘You mean stop the coup and don’t run the story. MAN FAILS TO BITE DOG. Is that what you mean?’”

A wonderfully acid little book.

“She took one of her poodle's charcoal biscuits out of the packet and ate it herself. 'Either these are quite delicious or quite disgusting. Like many things in life, it's rather hard to tell which,' she said.”