In his most recent novel Anéantir, Michel Houellebecq says that the news media and the state apparatus began to meld into one in the decade of the 2010s because that’s precisely when both started to lose power. The newspapers and the television were destroyed by the Internet and the ubiquitous smartphones. The institutions of the state were undermined by the globalization. So the two joined into one in order to preserve some power.

All I can add is that yes, they joined into one and then offered themselves up to a few supranational monopolizes in the capacity of their enforcer / battering ram. And at least, since COVID people don’t treat me like an escaped mental patient when I say this. Finally, it’s become too obvious for anybody but the complicit and the utterly brainwashed to notice.

I’m reading Anéantir, and I’m in love with it. I’m at the halfway point, and for now this is the most tender, sweet, unhurried, and serious novel by Houellebecq I have read. I don’t know if it’s been translated into English yet. I prefer to read my French authors in Spanish because I find translations to be better among the two Romance languages. Since I haven’t finished, I’m not ready to say anything definitive about the novel other than that this is serious literature, my friends. Vive la France because it’s got its literature back.

Tomatoes went into a homemade pasta sauce with fresh corn, basil, and grated cheese. In short, the leftovers I accumulated from the visit of my relatives. The pasta was gathered from a collection of boxes that had some sad, abandoned remains rolling around.

The rest of the tomatoes I’m planning to bake with a fish called “climbing perch” from Vietnam. We’ll see how that goes. Thank you, everybody, for suggestions!