it's the kung fu littéraire!

I had some posts earlier about Michel Houellebecq's recent trip to the Hammer, but for various reasons, I was not able to follow him for the rest of his sojourn around Los Angeles. Luckily for us, the LA Weekly was.

Outside the restaurant, Houellebecq took a break to smoke a small cigar and talk about his literary rivals in France. “People claim to attack each other for ideological reasons, but it’s much more animalistic than that — it’s because they inhabit the same space.” Then he dropped into a martial-arts crouch and looked quickly from side to side. “They come from the left, they come from the right — it’s the kung fu littéraire!” he said, launching himself into a series of surprisingly deft swivels and kicks, dispatching his enemies one after another. But when it came to Bernard-Henri Lévy, the celebrated French philosopher known by his initials, “BHL,” Houellebecq transformed himself into a raptor out of a cheap Japanese horror movie and bit Lévy’s head off. “That was BHL, folks!”

In other follow-up news, I was not able to attend the Los Angeles Conservatory event, "Looking at Los Angeles" (mentioned here), and apparently I missed Julius Shulman telling Ben Stiller his work was crap.