The mass-man would never have accepted authority external to himself had not his surroundings violently forced him to do so. As to-day, his surroundings do not so force him, the everlasting mass-man, true to his character, ceases to appeal to other authority and feels himself lord of his own existence. On the contrary the select man, the excellent man is urged, by interior necessity, to appeal from himself to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, whose service he freely accepts.… Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline — the noble life.
– José Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of The Masses
Noble Life and Common Life
Last Chance to Talk About The War
Last week I watched all three parts of the new German miniseries Generation War (original German title: Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter). It’s one of the most impressive war films I’ve recently seen. In general, German cinema continues to do a great job in reviewing the German past (Der Untergang, Das Baader Meinhof Komplex, etc. etc.). A miniseries like GW seems to be part of a new generation of films about the Second World War; more realistic and grim, to name some key aspects. I’m still a fan of romantic war films such as The Great Escape (starring Steve McQueen), but films like Generation War are the ones that really get you thinking. GW is about five friends who meet up in Berlin just before the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. They promise each other to meet again at Christmas – they all expect the war to be finished by then. As we know, the war takes another course, and only three of the five friends eventually meet up, shortly after the battle of Berlin in 1945. Continue reading
“Friend,” Short Film With Fringe DNA
This is a moving short film featuring John Noble, who’s probably best known for playing Walter Bishop on Fringe (one of my favourite fictional characters). “Friend” was co-produced by Noble and his daughter Jessie, who initially approached him with the script. What’s remarkable also is that the entire crew consists of former Fringe crew members.
Telling the story of a man dealing with grief in a manner even Walter Bishop would admire, Noble has no doubt that the short — which also features a final-moments appearance by Penny Noble, his wife of 40 years — “will be considered cryptic by some…there is a lot to this little film and I look forward to sharing it with Fringe fans who appreciate the mysterious side of life.”
– Article on tvguide.com
The Genius of Language
The truth of the matter is that my faculty to write in English is as natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born. I have a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent part of myself. English for me was neither a matter of choice nor adoption. The merest idea of adoption had never entered my head.
– Joseph Conrad in A Personal Record
My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses – the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions – which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.
– Vladimir Nabokov in an afterword to Lolita
I’m currently reading The Genius of Language, a collection of essays that gives a wonderful insight in the world of bilingual writing. What Conrad (cited in the editor’s introduction by Wendy Lesser) says about choice or adoption is interesting; for me, writing in English was a choice at first, but recently I realised that there’s no way back (which leaves me to wonder whether it was a choice at all in the first place). Continue reading
Mulisch and the Eichmann Case
Here’s a fascinating composite photograph made by Dutch writer Harry Mulisch for his report of the Eichmann trial, Criminal Case 40/61. It might well be the first great Dutch work in the modern tradition of literary journalism. What’s literary about it is that Mulisch writes not just about the events in court, his analysis of Eichmann and his “mythologizing” approach are more prominent than that. His analysis of Eichmann had the approval of German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt, who based her theory of “the banality of evil” on the Eichmann case. Evil, she theorised, is merely committed by ordinary men, who can’t make the distinction between right and wrong anymore. This banality was the most concerning aspect of evil according to Arendt. Mulisch’ and Arendt’s views weren’t completely similar, but their analyses aren’t worlds apart either. Both stress Eichmann’s “thoughtlessness”: his apparent inability to think and to just obey instead. Therefore – Mulisch wrote – Eichmann wasn’t that much of a criminal: he just was capable of doing anything, whatever that would’ve been. Both Mulisch and Arendt didn’t reduce evil to banality: the banality in itself makes evil possibly even more concerning than it already is.
The composite photograph appears early in Criminal Case 40/61. With it, Mulisch demonstrates Eichmann’s two faces. The portrait in the center was taken shortly after Eichmann’s apprehension by Mossad agents. On the left and the right are both halves, mirrored with themselves. This shows the remarkable asymmetry of Eichmann’s face: the left face seems to be that of an ordinary man and the right one seems to be the face of a murderer. But Mulisch argues that it’s actually the opposite: the right face is the face of the man who sees what the man with the left face is doing. In other words: we have the real Eichmann, the ruthless Eichmann and the witness Eichmann. A fascinating theory taken out of a highly recommendable book. Eichmann might be dead for more than fifty years now – he continues to be a thought-provoking case study.
Bolaño’s Advice For Writing Short Stories
Read some useful advice in Between Parentheses yesterday evening. Isn’t Bolaño just great? “It is best to write short stories three or five at a time. If you have the energy, write them nine or fifteen at a time.” Thanks to the people at Biblioklept for putting these scans from World Literature Today online.
Tommy Wieringa on IMPAC Shortlist
Caesarion, a novel by Dutch writer Tommy Wieringa, has reached the shortlist of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Wieringa has some strong competitors, because Michel Houellebecq and Haruki Murakami are also nominated for the literary prize (worth € 100,000) with respectively The Map and the Territory and 1Q84. According to The Guardian, there haven’t been this many translated novels on the shortlist in the prize’s history.
Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker won the Impac award in 2010 with The Twin. I mentioned both his and Wieringa’s novel in a round-up of recently translated Dutch fiction on The Millions. The winner will be announced on June 6.
How to Expand Your English Vocabulary
Since I started to write in English more often – as this blog is showcasing – I felt an increasing need to expand my vocabulary. Not only would that make my writing more eloquently; the English language is now also triggering my curiosity, making me strive to perfection. And although there’s the modern saying there’s an app for that, I found a web site that’s better than all the apps I came across. Vocabulary.com offers a great learning experience to increase your English vocabulary, both for native speakers and non-native speakers. You learn new words through multiple-choice questions and when you’re wrong, a word will come back later. It’s even teaching you the various meanings of a single word in different contexts. The New York Times praised the site just this weekend, saying it’s an example for online learning. Probably the best part of it: it’s all for free (something Dutch people always appreciate).
Among other words, I’m currently practising with sequester, fledgling, baleful, augur and precocious. Started yesterday and already feel I’m improving. Isn’t this awesome?
Literature and the Digital Era
Here’s an interesting article from The Guardian’s book blog; it makes one wonder (especially when you’re a writer) to which extent the digital era should be integrated into fiction. Not only does the presence of computers and smartphones have a major influence on the atmosphere of your story, such devices can also ‘lay waste to many fictional devices’.
“You say you are quite prepared to write novels in which people go around with personal electronic devices in their pockets,” he [J.M. Coetzee] writes to Paul Auster in Here and Now, a forthcoming collection of their letters. “I must say I am not. The telephone is about as far as I will go in a book, and then reluctantly. If people (“characters”) are continually going to be speaking to one another at a distance, then a whole gamut of interpersonal signs and signals, verbal and non-verbal, voluntary and involuntary, has to be given up. Dialogue … just isn’t possible.” Continue reading
Thoughts While Reading 2666
Just started reading the third part of Roberto Bolaño’s magnum opus 2666, so I’m around page 300 now (with 750 pages of the Dutch edition still to go). As is the case with novels of this size – 2666 is around 400,000 words long; The Kindly Ones, a novel of similar length, eventually took
me three months to read – some impressions from when you just started reading fade away as you’re making progress. So, time to write something down. Much has been said and written about 2666 since it was published posthumously in 2004 (Bolaño died in 2003), so the only value of this post could be in my personal experiences.
While reading, I realised once again that Bolaño’s work always reminds me of the joy that should be inherent to writing. (At least, in the early stages – later on it’s a matter of blood, sweat and tears regularly.) His pacing and sense of humor are also an example for my own writing style: sometimes I struggle with the amount of humour I should add in my writing, as if it’s a duality: either I write a humorous, rather slapstickish story, or I try to make my prose as stilistic as possible, weighing every word, every sentence, creating a quite gloomy atmosphere. For example, I wrote a story about an orange-like sphere that suddenly starts growing on a ceiling (the slapstick way) and I also wrote a story about the quest for a mysterious guitarist in the States (the gloomy way).
(By the way, I’ve translated both stories into English and hope to get them published online soon.)
Continue reading