Annoying popup avoidance:
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I should say at the outset, donât be put off by the first two image-sounds that appear on the screen: first, a cigarette being lit; second, a typewriter clacking. I immediately thought to myself, oh shit, here we go, the intellectual writer smoking and typing. I donât know what it is, but particularly when it comes to women writers in the mid-20th century, itâs always the same set of visual cues. Any time a representation of Lillian Hellman or Mary McCarthy or Hannah Arendt appears on the screen, theyâre smoking at the typewriter.
That said, I thought the description of Arendtâs early emancipated Jewish milieu in Königsberg was a kind of visual treat. You get a genuine sense of a middle to upper-middle class upbringing. When the program moves to Marburg, where Arendt was a student, the discussion of her affair with Heidegger is really well done, bringing out the peculiar details of his demands on her (join me on a train heading south out of town but sit in the second car behind me, that kind of thing), but also, all the ways in which she was able to extract what she wanted and needed from him. And then the transition of her move to Berlin, which was in high Weimar mode of the mid to late 1920s. A little too much shades of Babylon Berlin, but it captures, visually, the combination of extremity and celebration of the era. For each segmentâKönigsberg, Marburg, Berlinâyou get a real sense of place and the person she was in that place.
I was extraordinarily impressed by two of the commentatorsâLyndsey Stonebridge and Kathleen Jonesâwho really know what it is to talk biographically about a writer like Arendt. More than details, quirky and banal, they provide a sense of story to her life, bringing Arendt to life in a way that that movie about her, which came out a few years ago, completely fails to do.
It also helps that the incomparable Nina Hoss, easily my favorite actress working today, does all the voiceovers of Arendt.
One last thing: the centrality of Hans Jonas as a voice in the discussion, particularly during their Marburg years. It really adds a dimension thatâs not often brought out so clearly as it is here, namely, their status as Jewish outsiders in the academic world.
Wait, one more thing: The parallels with today. Again, this is what I dread most in these productions. The inevitable incantations of Origins of Totalitarianism read against visuals of Trump or whoever. But in this case, so far, I was struck by something quite different. In the discussion of the Jews of Königsberg and then the Jews of Berlin, the producers subtly make the point that many of these Jews, though of course not all, were newcomers and immigrants to Germany, having fled not only antisemitic pogroms (Arendtâs great grandfather was one such refugee) but also and more important desperate poverty. The Jews of Germany get recast here not as part of some ancient theological or cultural scapegoat but as new immigrant arrivals in a war-torn industrial power and then a faltering economy. I was impressed by the delicate echo the producers were going for.
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Oh, that sounds excellentâŠ
I will say, about the smoking/typewriter thing⊠Yeah, itâs a bit of a cliche, but for a reason. Everyone used to smoke (not everyone, but you know, it was far more common) and writers wrote on typewriters⊠so it makes sense, I guess.
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I see what you mean but I guess for me, it doesnât make sense, if what youâre trying to do is present a captivating portrait of a unique individual, instead of immediately shoehorning them into the same cliched box as other people get shoehorned into because they did a similar kind of work in a similar era. If youâre trying to present a portrait that shows whatâs unique and captivating about an individual, why start out with the same tired set of cliched visual cues?
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Yeah, very trueâŠ
Could be that the director believed it was not nearly as played out as we might find it? I guess one of the most well-known pictures of her was her with a cigarette⊠Could also just be as simple as the director likes that imagery, too.
But it sounds like they did not stay grounded in cliches. Like the point about Jewish people being generally speaking immigrants to German cities is kind of interesting.
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Cory Doctorow had a review of this book up on his site a few months ago. My library hold came available today and Iâve already read it for 3 hours. The temptation to stay up and finish is very strong, but I must resist! I have things to do tomorrow.
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However, there is hope.
The Big Five are not the only ones capable of publishing books. Small presses, with their miniscule budgets, have kept literary fiction on life support. They take the creative risks that the Big Five wonât, and they nurture and sustain writersâ careers in a way the Big Five no longer cares to. If you enjoyed James by Percival Everett (published to great fanfare this year by Big Five imprint Doubleday), thank the small press Graywolf who doggedly published Everett for decades before the Big Five finally decided to cash in on him.
The readerâs challenge now is to look beyond the Big Fiveâs mediocrity machine. This is not easy, considering how many imprints the Big Five holds, but it is possible. Readers are not just static consumers. If we choose which writers we want to read, we can also choose which publishers we want to buy fromâand can recognize that, at this moment in time, the Big Five and the small presses are driven by entirely different incentives.
Literature, and literary fiction, is art, and art is unkillable. But literary culture can much more easily be destroyed. Today, the Big Five have the deepest pockets but lack the agility, chutzpah, and possibly even desire to act as guardians of high literature. Small presses such as Akashic, Two Dollar Radio, Short Flight/Long Drive and many others are filling that gap, notwithstanding their more limited budgets. In the end, it falls to readers to recognize what is happening and to seek out books from publishers that are genuinely interested in transcendent, creative work.
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Itâs coming for ALL the creative industries! Itâs too bad far too many people just⊠donât seem to give a shit about anything anymore.
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Exactly!
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I only ever really listen to him when he wears his cape.
The goggles are optional, though.
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Finally got around to reading Night at the Circus by Angela Carter. Itâs a tall tale that just keeps doubling down on its own absurdity, totally revealing in unfettered magical realism. It tells the story of Fevvers, a winged woman (or is she?) who performs in a traveling circus, and Jack Walser, a journalist who becomes enamored with her. Recommended.
The figure engraved on this medallion was that of a pardon my French member, sir, of the
male variety; that is, a phallus, in the condition known in heraldry as rampant, and there were
little wings attached to the ballocks thereof, which caught my eye immediately. Around the shaft
of this virile member twined the stem of a rose whose bloom nestled somewhat coyly at the place
where the foreskin folded back. Whether the thing was ancient or modern I could not tell, but it
represented a heavy investment.
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