Misunderstood

Having felt vastly misunderstood ever since moving to The Netherlands in 1998, really felt like I've run into one brick wall after another, I found this interesting quote online last night. It clarifies much of the misrepresentation I've experienced here, from the neighbors, to the teachers at school, to literally just about everyone I've "bumped" into since coming here... Of course, there are a few valiant people out there who have been capable of looking beyond whatever it is about me that turns so many people off... Thank god for them!... The simple matter of the fact is, I don't belong in a flat country. It's quite obvious. I don't belong here... Here's the quote...

The fundamental attribution error: "The tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based, explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing situational explanations. In other words, people have an unjustified tendency to assume that a person's actions depend on what 'kind' of person that person is rather than on the social and environmental forces influencing the person." Amen.

Biding Time during a Block

What a bizarre lack of inspiration politicians are. Yesterday morning I went to a book signing in Rotterdam of Bill Clinton's latest political tract, Give or Geef (they only had Dutch language copies).

After waiting in line for about two hours, I finally got a glimpse of the man in person.... My first reaction was, wow, he's short!... Not much taller than my 5'6"..... I admit to feeling a surge of American patriotic sentiment, standing as I was in a crowd of perspiring Dutch people, nearly all of them taller than I. I nearly cried, I felt so bad for myself.... But I was able to wait out my emotional wave, and the tears didn't come.

I shook his hand, said my name, told him I voted for him, and Hillary, which really caught his attention. He actually looked right at me, turned his head to look again, and thanked me. I was able to steal a few more seconds, and a few extra glances, than the rest of the folks were when I actually said my name in an American accent. It seemed that most of the people weren't saying anything....

I had spent some of my time while feeling faint in line thinking that I had better things to do, but I persevered in the thought that this might be my only opportunity to touch Bill, and to look him in the eye. I actually started to feel inspired, and made several resolutions on my walk back to the Metro. I too could do great things....! I too could do great things....! What a revelation. My life was going to make a great turn around that afternoon! And I had a brief meeting with Bill Clinton to thank for a brighter tomorrow.

When I read the sentence on the poster in the bookstore, "We all have the capacity to do great things," it reinforced my feeling that I was doing something good, of iets nuttigs, in het Nederlands. Just goes to show what a sucker I am for marketing. I even told the guy behind me that the book was probably inspirational, if a bit clichéd. Well, my friends, I am here to tell you now that it is none of this....

Later that evening I started to read the book, which turned out, as I've already said, to be a political tract in support of Hillary's campaign. The book starts out as a list of all of the great things the Clintons have done for the world, and of what great people they are on top of it all. Hillary was of course a great mother who contributed to the common good her entire life. Then it goes on to list other great and powerful, and fabulously rich people in the world who've done great things, including fighting aids in Africa, and the Clintons are associated with all of many of these people, naturally.

It's funny that I've read persuasive articles to the contrary in The New York Review of Books. Hillary was never much of an activist, and turned her back on her activist roots in political revenge. All of the rich Western NGOs crusading against AIDS in the developing world have apparently done a lot more harm than good. As always, the most that's been done to combat the AIDS epidemic has come from the grassroots level, and not from ingratiating politicians looking to score humanitarian points with the masses.

The article on AIDS in the NYRB quotes a Ugandan saying: "there is Slim AIDS and Fat AIDS. Slim AIDS is what happens to the emaciated victims of HIV. Fat AIDS is what happens to the consulting companies who win contracts from International AIDS Inc."

Ever the salesman, Bill was out there plugging himself and Hillary, signing 1,000 books in Rotterdam, and I was one of the suckers who shelled out 20 euro, and several hours of my time to get one.

Eeking out a few words...

About two years ago I picked up the Joyce Carol Oats novel Blonde at a used bookstore in Amsterdam. There was this great sales guy from Hoorn working there who'd worked as an botonist in Peru, or someplace, and was slowly writing a Ph.D, but that's another story.... (I'm always surprised, at my age, when anyone flirts with me, my head turning days having ended long ago....)

Of course Arther Miller plays a small role in the book, since he was Marylin's husband. She criticizes him for for slow writing. Apparently, he spent a lot of time on one project, eeking out a few sentences, or was it paragraphs, per day. So that means that in the spectrum from Joyce, extreme profluence, to Arther Miller, and then to me (Daniel Bartholemew might figure in there somewhere), I might not be doing too badly as a writer of minimal words, after all. :-)

Incidentally, I became so depressed reading Blonde, that I had to put it down in the end, and have yet to read the last 50-100 pages. Poor Norma Jean. Otherwise, brilliant book about the tragic life of a brilliant woman.

Write 1000-2000 words a day

Here's a goal: If you want to be a writer, you should write 1000-2000 words every day! Of course, all of the advice says, if you want to write, you have to write regularly. Fair enough. Very sound advice indeed. Although, I can't seem to follow it.

Does this mean 2000 words of blather? Or does it have to be focused, purposeful writing. Will "automatic" dadaist writing do? The advice doesn't say. So many days go by of me persecuting myself for not coming up with something brilliant, predigested, and perfectly worded, that I do not write a word, but writhe in a lack of profluence.

Some of my best writing is under 500 words, which almost always comes out in a minute of inspiration. Problem is, inspiration running low.... Of course, this was an advice website for aspiring freelance journalists, a career I gave up over 15 years ago. The guy said that he reads hundreds of magazines. I just don't have the stamina for that anynmore. I may have back in my early twenties, but I changed, and now that's all over.

Even though I am not hyper-productive, and I question my motivation a lot, underneath it all, I like to think I am a writer.

Some other advice I've read is to tell people that you're a writer, if you want to be one. I did this for years in between dropping a journalism career, and dreaming of writing stories. Okay, I'd written some stuff in Alice Sebold's creative writing classes at Hunter College in New York, so I can't say that I was a total fraud. I'd written lots of other things. But I did feel like a fake a lot of the time when I told people (mostly in the art community of New York) that I was a fiction writer. Some astute people would want to know what kind of fiction I wrote. I had a remedy for this, too. I told them the truth, which is that I play around with voice, using material from my own life, developing different persona's.

Once, years ago, in the process of giving up a journalism career, I met with a guy who was a feature writer for Forbes or Fortune. He told me that when he was starting out he had what he like to call the "impostor complex." He was working at Time, but had a constant internal dialogue that he was an impostor, and that sooner or later, someone was going to find him out, and that he would get the sack. Of course, his fears were never played out, and he went on to have a career in journalism.

What a shame that I've never had the guts to go for anything. Even with people around me telling me that I was capable, I was always intent on proving to them that they were all wrong, and that I was right. I really was the impostor. It's a great way to squander all of your talent, grinding it down into sodden ashes.

There can always be a new dawn. I might just achieve my personal millennium goal to become a writer, yet. Hooray!

I Love Blogging!

This is superb. I love blogging now. Even if it never gets me anyplace, or if no one ever reads a word of it, it beats a journal. It's such an interesting format. Even if I only eek out a few entries per month, and not a soul notices, it's an infinitely constructive way of looking back at myself, a kind of review. It puts me into perspective. Every entry smiles back at me, and I feel good.

Bergman, If only I'd been an actor...

Recently I've been trying to watch, or re-watch, as many Bergman films as I can obtain at the library in Rotterdam. The actresses are all so beautiful in his films. If I could turn the clock back twenty years I would start taking acting classes. Tom Hank's talent agent once asked me if I were an actress and gave me his card. I was eighteen. It took me a few weeks, but I called him and he told me that if I didn't know by then that I wanted to act then I wasn't an actor. I was looking at Max von Sydow playing an emotionally isolated man in The Passion of Anna, and I realized how fully an art acting is. While I sit here in my little house and identify with many of the emotions in his films, and the revelations the actors make, I realize that they are playing a role. It might sound simplistic, but Liv Ullman isn't the sad, conflicted woman she portrays on screen. They play their roles so convincingly I am under their influence, realizing at the same time that they have both led personally fulfilling, artistically rich lives. How marvelous it must be to create such great works of art. To use your face, body, beauty in artistic expression. Perhaps I'm too shy, but my current mood is that acting would be the ultimate for me. If only I'd been more assertive with Mr Maslow. I could have told him about the music video I directed and played in at Mountain View High School in Orem, Utah at 15. Is that young enough? ;-) How remarkable to play a person in anguish, but not to be that person in daily life. Sometimes I think that my life resembles a Bergman film without the opulence, but this isn't a fair comparison, either. Anguish is also a performance you can play for yourself. It can be just as easy to shed it and play a titteringly happy person on the verge of gushing joy.

I could run...

I read somewhere that successful people participate in a sport. Last night I decided I would jump on my bike this morning and ride over to the track near the zoo. I think that five miles is about 20 laps. That was my goal. Then I would come back here and dig into Swedish. My day ends at 12:00 when I need to rush off to the kids' school. The forecast is for rain and more rain. Recently I confessed to a few people that the weather here had grown on me, but I think it just keeps me inside the house. At High School in Ann Arbor I was on the track team. We had to run in all kinds of weather. I ran up muddy hills in the freezing rain. All these vague notions of running down the drain, I guess I'll just skip to the Swedish.