“In 1944, Marceau’s father was sent to Auschwitz, where he died. Later, he reflected on his father’s death: “Yes, I cried for him.”
But he also thought of all the others killed: “Among those kids was maybe an Einstein, a Mozart, somebody who (would have) found a cancer drug,” he told reporters in 2000. “That is why we have a great responsibility. Let us love one another.”
“We must both have been hungry because we constantly led the conversation round to food. — “What is your favorite dish, grandad?” — “All of them, my son. It’s a great sin to say this is good and that is bad.” — “Why? Can’t we make a choice?” — “No, of course we can’t.” — “Why not?” — “Because there are people who are hungry.” I was silent, ashamed. My heart had never been able to reach that height of nobility and compassion.”
That’s from one of my favorite films, Zorba the Greek.
Here’s Anthony Quinn as Zorba and Alan Bates as his English visitor, on the island of Crete, comforting the ageing courtesan, Mme. Hortense (Leila Kedrova in a great performance). As she recalls to them her triumphs as a dancer in her youth, she’s ridiculous, pathetic, cringe-making and noble all in turn.
And then there’s Irene Pappas, whom someone once said was too ferociously beautiful for Hollywood stardom, as the widow who is stoned by the village, as punishment for her dalliance with the Englishman, his first adventure away from his books, no doubt…
He, of course, can go back to them afterward. She loses her life…..
An essay on the politics of fiction:
“In the context of the publicity surrounding the forthcoming novel, Londonstani, which like my recent novel, Psychoraag (Black and White Publishing, 2004), appears to play with demotic, my best wishes go out to the author, good on him. I have only been able to read the first chapter, which appeared in Prospect magazine. The following critique is reserved for the transnational publishing industry and mainstream, England-based print media, neither of which entities would touch Psychoraag in terms of publication, reviews, interviews, invitations to literary festivals – so that in the two-and-a-half years since Psychoraag has been published, in these terms there has been almost zilch. In this piece, I’m not going to discuss the overtly political stuff (such as D-Notices, planted journalists, etc.) which applies more to news and political features reportage, investigative journalism and other areas of non-fiction. I am concerned here with fiction, and in particular, what is known as literary fiction.
I should say that I am very lucky to be based in Scotland – a country which has produced many wonderful writers of fiction, including, in recent years, Irvine Welsh, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, J.K. Rowling, AL Kennedy, Ali Smith, Louise Welsh, Alexander McCall Smith, Iain Banks, Ian Rankin and many more (the list grows longer very year). This corpus of work represents some of the most exciting, commercially successful and ground-breaking writing of the past three decades in the Anglophone world. Coda: Scotland is not a literary backwater.
Psychoraag has just won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award in California, was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (the oldest literary prize in the UK) and has been nominated by librarians for this year’s (Dublin-based) IMPAC Prize. Psychoraag has received good reviews in Scotland, South Asia, various web-based magazines and in the British Asian media, is being translated by the Paris-based publisher, Editions Métailié into French and is being made into a Royal National Institute for the Blind ‘talking book’ – so it can’t be total rubbish. When my first novel, The Snake (Creation Books) came out in 1997, under the pseudonym, ‘Melanie Desmoulins’, to my knowledge it was the first ever novel written by a black Scottish person to have been published and Psychoraag was definitely the first published novel by an Asian Scot. Psychoraag was compared with the work of both Rushdie and Irvine Welsh [1].
One prominent and respected Scottish academic, himself a novelist, recently wrote that Psychoraag is “the most important and innovative Glasgow novel since [James Kelman’s seminal novel, published in 1984] The Busconductor Hines” [2]. In 2005, along with works by the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, Adam Smith and Jackie Kay, Psychoraag was listed as one of the ‘100 Best Ever Scottish Books’ as compiled by the Scottish Book Trust and the List magazine (the Scottish equivalent of Time Out). It is a primary text in the study of Scottish Literature at university undergraduate level and my work is also taught in Scottish secondary schools in conjunction with BBC Scottish TV Education. Another prominent contemporary Scottish writer described my work thus: “From his earliest writings, [Saadi] was an important and unique voice. Quite apart from being one of the breakthrough Scots-Asian (if that term means anything) voices, his work was always refined, sure, and deeply erudite. It speaks not just for one community – Scottish, Asian, Glaswegian – but, as all great writing should, for the human condition. What it is to be alive, now, in this complex world. All the various histories, mythologies and circumstances that shape us” [3]. And there’s much more of this….”
More at “Psychoraag: the Gods at the Door,” Spike Magazine.
It’s an interesting and wide-ranging essay and its topic is one any writer, whether first world, third world (or underworld) will take something from.
It’s not a comfortable topic though..
Although I’ve had similar thoughts myself, I’m not sure whether there is any use in pursuing them or even drawing large conclusions from them. Yes, the book world is overwhelmingly biased — in many ways, class, race, language. Think about the enormous advantage an English speaking writer enjoys. Vernacular writers can’t reach that kind of audience. But what should we do about it? Start writing in the vernacular in sympathy? Or just not take the pecking order so seriously? I am for the latter.
Play the game — if you want to — but realize it is a game.
Of course, that happens to suit my temperament. I realize that many writers thrive on the literary circuit.
To me, the quiet life seems the one to envy.
“Where the battle rages there the loyalty of the soldier is proved. And to be steady on all the battle fields besides is merely flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”
Martin Luther
“By reversing a basic rule that all things which are to be taught must first be defined, he had found a way out of all this. He was pointing to no principle, no rule of good writing, no theory…but he was pointing to something, nevertheless, that was very real, whose reality they couldn’t deny. The vacuum that had been created by the withholding of grades was suddenly filled with the positive goal of Quality, and the whole thing fit together. Students, astonished, came by his office and said, “I used to just hate English. Now I spend more time on it than anything else.” Not just one or two. Many. The whole Quality concept was beautiful. It worked. It was that mysterious, individual, internal goal of each creative person, on the blackboard at last….”
From Robert Pirsig, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”
“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”
Ecce Homo, Foreword
Friedrich Nietzsche
So says Wally Conger in an interview with Sunny Maravillosa via Tom Ender at Endervidualism):
“Wally: It can be confusing, can’t it? [laughs] But I try to keep it simple. I’m a Hess-Konkin fundamentalist on left and right designations for the broad political landscape. Given Rothbard’s claim that our libertarian forebears were late 18th, early 19th century classical liberal “leftists”, and subscribing, as Hess and Konkin did, to the idea that politics follows a straight line, not a circle, I believe liberty lies in the leftward direction and culminates at the farthest left in statelessness, or anarchism. Likewise, as you travel rightward along the line, you move toward bureaucracy and concentrated power and wealth. That direction terminates in, well, tyranny, despotism, and repression. Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and FDR were all men of the right. Fidel Castro oversees a right regime. George W. Bush, of course, falls on the extreme right, as do Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and the reptilian Chuck Schumer. Whatever their rhetoric, they all believe in consolidating power into the fewest possible hands….”
Comment:
While I like Conger’s optimism, I am not sure that I follow this argument. There are too many ideas here not fully teased out. What is power, exactly? How is liberty affected by power – whichever version of power we are talking about?
As for politics being a straight line – I simply don’t buy it. Human interaction and ideological cross-pollination are so complex, many- layered and dynamic that any two-dimensional model is on its face suspect….
“If all my possessions and powers were to be taken from me with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of speech, for by it I could recover all the rest.”
Daniel Webster.
This, from legendary Italian tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, who died on Thursday, September 6 at the age of 71:
“I’m not a politician, I’m a musician,” he told the BBC Music Magazine in an April 1998 article about his efforts for Bosnia. “I care about giving people a place where they can go to enjoy themselves and to begin to live again. To the man you have to give the spirit, and when you give him the spirit, you have done everything.”
More at the New York Times.
Maryland Public Television is running a performance at the Metropolitan of one of the operas he was most famous for, Donizetti’s comic opera, “L’Elisir d’Amour” (The Elixir of Love) – a gorgeous example of the bel canto style (literally, “beautiful singing), and an infinitely better use of human breath and lung capacity than anything emanating from the halls of power.
Classical music, fortunately, never caught onto the doctrinaire and self-indulgent egalitarianism of our times. It takes completely unearned talent and relentless self-discipline and criticism; it glorifies individualism and self-actualization, disdains the slightest mediocrity and bestows its prizes only on an aristocracy. No amount of sweat, good intentions, or legislation will turn you into either Pavarotti or Donizetti.
Supremely unfair, but a lesson best learned early. As my piano teacher once told me crushingly: You can’t have something just because you want it.
And what people never seem to remember is that great talent usually goes hand in hand with torments beyond the ordinary — Donizetti, who composed 31 operas in about a dozen years, also lost his three children and his wife, suffered from syphilis and died after a bout of insanity at the age of 51. I wonder how that could be distributed equally to everyone.
This post is not, I hope, an example of the “three parts of ego” that one reader finds in “Mobs,” though he grudgingly admits it was a “great read,” which missed being even better because of the heaping scorn it poured on a variety of people and things.
I wonder about that.
Bill and I had many discussions about the levels of snarkiness the many-headed would take before throwing some of it right back in our face.
We were warned it would offend reviewers. It might. We took out a lot of things. And we put back some. We thought about softening a lot of it. I tried numskulls and nitwits, instead of idiots — just to be nice and all…..
But the herd we are talking about…..is not something outside any of us. That’s the point of the book.
Some people seem to have missed that. The mob isn’t really “out there” — it’s something we all struggle against within ourselves. The urge to conform, to follow, to do as others do, to obey senseless orders, turn on the outsider, commit judicial murder.
The heroes of our book are the individuals who don’t turn their back on the defenseless and the voiceless. But we aren’t about to confuse that kind of goodness with the professions of corporate journalists, public policy wonks, and verbose politicians.
So let me say this. Except for some modest Bush-bashing ,and of course, the mandatory Thomas Friedman festivity (this is a cottage industry not only down at the Daily Reckoning but on some academic and left-wing sites), I really don’t know who or what it was that we ridiculed that was so sacrosanct….or didn’t deserve it.
It’s apparently OK to commit mass killings, despoil countries, lie, cheat and swindle, but mentioning that fact bluntly is altogether just too, too terrible. Next, I am going to hear — mean-spirited!
Our critic doesn’t seem to have figured out how hopeful the book is. It has nothing offensive whatsoever to say about those who really do good — the Sophie Scholls and Dr. V’s of the world. Its venom is directed at the great ones who so richly deserve it, but are protected by our platitudinous culture from public scorn.
As for James Surowiecki – we criticize him a bit, but only tangentially. Proving a thesis is not what this book is about. It’s exactly what it’s not about.
“Mobs” is not a pop sociology tract. It’s simply our report on the state of affairs in what we call the public spectacle. Wars, manias, swindles — don’t any of these call for some excoriation?
They do.
No apologies.