4/9/2023 0 Comments Snort the red bullBut there is only so much piss that you can take out of a person, even out of someone like Full o’ Bull. In the mean time, sure, I’ve been having fun annoying my host, one of the leitmotifs of this novel. If we look at how often they’ve been coming out and do the math, adding twenty minutes per installment for research and another five to ten for finding a couple of nice pictures or audio fragments, the writing of this novel accounts for a measly three to four hours of activity per month! How long does it take me to write one of these installments? Half an afternoon at most. The question is all the more relevant considering my reputation as “the fastest pen east of the Mississippi”. Speaking of getting from A to B, Linda tells me that a lot of my fans have been wondering what else I’ve been up to all this time here in Amsterdam, that is, when I’m not working on this novel. If so, good for them, but let’s just call that a happy accident, or collateral damage, if you will. Who knows, maybe some of my readers will come across an occasional passage that teaches them something about who and what they are, or even makes them “better” people. So why this lofty moralism, why this extra demand to educate or even enlighten our passengers along the way? C’mon guys, lighten up. It’s hard enough for each of us individually to stay focussed on what we do, let alone to hold other peoples’ attention for any significant length of time, to keep everybody aboard, in other words. Time is one of the toughest dimensions to navigate. ![]() It’s that simple.Īnd yet at the same time, it’s not that simple. Our vessels may vary, a creaky rowboat in Full o’ Bull’s case, a great big ocean liner in mine, but the goal is always the same: to transport our readers from point in time A to point in time B. ![]() The existential void looms large as ever, and people still rely on us writers and other entertainers to help them across. Times may have changed, but Time has not. That’s essentially what these first story-tellers did: they held their fellow tribe members’ attention between the moments that they had something better to do. The word “entertain” comes from the French “entretenir”, tenir meaning “to hold”, and entre meaning “between”. To help their tribe across the existential void, here’s where the first story-tellers stepped in, the first entertainers. “Umpf!” one of them grunts, which roughly translates to: so what do we do now? Until an awkward new feeling creeps up on them and they all stare at each other. They’ve just gorged themselves on the bison that the boys brought back from the hunt the other day. Imagine them sitting around a fire after having chased a rival tribe out of their neck of the woods. Maybe we should go back even further, to our prehistoric ancestors. C’mon Toby, you can do better than that!īut can I? Must I? What if my answer is not as trivial as it sounds? It keeps me busy.Īt which point many an interviewer will become cross with me. Heck, I don’t know, I might say with a coquettish shrug of the shoulders. Maybe we should go back to why I became a writer in the first place, a question I’ve been asked dozens of times in interviews. Why should my novels even show my readers who and what they are? What if they don’t? It’s the presumption hidden in the bit before the comma. It’s not the preposterous idea that I should make my readers better people. Something about the question has been bugging me all along. ![]() Is it enough for literature to show us who and what we are, or should literature make us better people, too? Here it is, on the official invitation that I received the other day: Have I been working on my acceptance speech? Uhm…Īnd have I determined the position I will be taking in the subsequent mini-colloquium on Literature and Morality? Uhm… what was the theme again? Tomorrow’s the big day folks, the day that an honest-to-goodness Dutch princess will be presenting me with a golden compass for providing the people of her kingdom with “a sense of direction in these troubled times”.
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