Bart Westgeest

Forfatter: Bart Westgeest

  • I never liked fairy tales

    (edit: I found this post from febr. 2008, written just before I started this blog. I might as well publish it here. I’ll write soon about how/why I found it)
    H. C. Andersen. Source: Wikipedia

    I never liked fairy tales, not even as a child. Yesterday I visited the H. C. Andersen museum in Odense and it didn’t really help me to change my mind. As a boy I liked the set-up of the stories, the athmosphere and questions that arose during the reading. I often was wondering how the story would end and how all problems would be solved. But the solutions that were offered to create an end to the stories were most of the times very unsatisfying. It was as if the writer didn’t know himself and just when it became interesting he or she created a witch or a fairy to do some magic and suddenly solve all unsolved endings. And they live happily ever after and got many children. Boom! End.

    I had in mind that H.C. Andersen and the Grimm Brothers used old folk tales and other sources and I got the idea that those original sources might be more interesting than these uninspired endings.

    During my visit to the museum yesterday I got the impression that H. C. Andersen was a hard working writer that gave almost everything in order to succeed. He tried many things to get his career going and apparently had the plan of producing as much as possible and hoping that something might work some day. This fits with my idea of the writer of the fairy tales being someone who knew how to write a story but who didn’t had much to add.

    It is also interesting to make a comparison between all his travels and visits to the upper class of Europe, and an, especially in our days, often advised managment plan of making one’s name known by giving interviews, lectures and making as much noise as possible. His travel activities must have helped him making a career in writing, which might explain part of his fame.

    According to the museum there are some reports of H. C. Andersen being unaware of the impression he made during these visits (most striking when visiting Charles Dickens) and probably unjustly combined with the fact that the seemed to be unsuccesful with woman I got the idea that he might have been a hard working man that had his mind set up on succeeding as a writer.
    The texts of the exhibition gave the impression that he wasn’t perfectly happy about his private life. It must have been tough for the young H.C. to become anything at all considering his unfortunate background, so his determination must have been vital for him during the main part of his life. One wonders if it didn’t turn into an obsession that ruled his life a little too much to become happy. It is nice that people like his stories but it must have been even more important for him as a person to live a happy life.

  • The Light

    Music: Hank Williams – I saw The Light (1948)

    It is hard to think of a truly good reason for us humans being around, if you ask me. There are several reasons possible, but which one you choose is depending whether or not you are religious, positively minded or for example an oblivious sports fan. If you are not one of the lucky ones that can somehow find a reason, chances are that you are wandering around trying hard to find some purpose in life.

    Not knowing what it all is for is one of the worst things that can happen to you. When there is no good reason for the existence of any part of the world around you, why would you bother trying anything, or even care about something?

    The one thing we do care about is our own person. We are the ones that see, feel and hear the world, and most of us are aware that we have a huge influence upon the interaction between ourselves and our surrounding. This means that the best thing to do in life is to develop ourselves and to be good to us and the people we meet.

    This isn’t always easy though, because when, for whatever reason, you meet boundaries that limit your possibility to develop or when you never seem to meet anyone willing to share at least some goodness with you, you might feel like your life is an endless trying to swim up the river with hardly any gain what so ever.

    Lucky are those that find their call, their niche, and that find a way to build upon their talents, to open up unexpected possibilities within themselves and their world, to blossom.

    If you manage to, let’s say, start a bank in your neighbourhood, and you love your work and things go well, you thrive and will be able to do good to yourself and others.

    If not, you struggle and hopefully will try again and again, and one more time. Will you ever see the light?

    Religion can serve as such an opener, as it gives, without needing any prequalifications, a sudden goal and aim in life. Here you can be good to others and therewith also to yourself. Your life has meaning, you are saved from trying and trying, no more swimming upstream.

    Maybe that is was drives us, whether we become a bank director or a good religious person, we are saved and have a purpose, we are doing well and feel happy.

    And who knows, this might include the answer why religion is less attractive in the western world at the moment. We have many opportunities to become bank director, nurse, a world traveler or a splendid partner. We can choose from many possibilities with hardly any financial or material worries.

  • Wikipedia thoughts

    I looked up the word Lucifer on Wikipedia and read a Danish page that explained me that it is the name of a roman god and that it later was used in, for example, the Bibel to describe the planet Venus. In the late middle-ages it became a synonym for the devil.
    The link to the Dutch version of that page leads to “Lucifer (Satan)” with no mention of the roman predecessor or a planet. In the overview-page of all articles in Dutch containing Lucifer there were many options (popband, novel, satan etc.) but non about the roman god. There was a one sentence mention (not a page) about Lucifer being “an old Latin name for the planet Venus”.

    It irritates me that a general article in Danish about the name Lucifer is linked to a Dutch article about the devil, without mentioning any roman predecessors. This is in my opinion another small sign about the Dutch society still being so entangled in christianty that it misforms history. There are many prechristian traditions, names and stories that were transformed at one point in history to fit into christianity, and I think that it is our duty to at least inform each other that there actually was life before that.

    The English Wikipedia page refers briefly to the name being a latin word given to the planet Venus and at the bottom of the page it links to an article about the ancient Greek god Eosphoros. They also mention the use of the name Lucifer or the interpretation of it in other beliefs than Christianity.

    I do not know how to make a remark about this on the Dutch Wikipedia pages – I might have to read the Wikipedia introduction first.

  • What tools should I use to write?

    What tools should I use to write?

    There are many programs for writing and editing texts and most are good for anybody and anything. Because basically they all do one thing – they let you create texts.

    As a writer you write, as an editor you edit and as a publisher you publish. The writer in you wants a tool that can create texts as quickly and easy as possible. Quick because when you are finally getting some good ideas or when the words are coming to your mind faster than you can type,  you need a tool that reacts immediately. Your mind is occupied with trying to grab the ideas and impulses so you also want something that is fool-proof and not distracting.

    After many thoughts and attempts I settled for the one obvious tool that does the job best: a plain text-editor.

    Text it

    A text editor is a small program that basically produces .txt files, which is just about the most bare and smallest kind of text-file you can produce. No different letter types or sizes, nice layout or  italics or bold, but just text, ready to be used everywhere you want. Because of the simple .txt format you can take it anywhere you like in the world of text-based software. Open it in your favourite word-processor and create the most beautiful layout you can think of or send it by email to your best friend who can read it instantly in the mail or open it in what ever software and operating system he or she might happen to use. Copy and past that long post into your blogging tool or create an archive of lightweight basic text files, future-proof.

    Text files are very convenient to back-up as their small size guarantees the shortest possible uploading time to a backup service, be it on the web or on your memory key. It will take you very likely more than a lifetime to write 2GB of .txt files, so you don’t have to worry about running out of space anywhere.

    But one of the main advantages is the quick response time of text editors. They open instantly and make my old computer react like a brand new top model. Keep a shortcut at hand and whenever an idea pops up write it down immediately and save it, either in a file of its own or keep a file open to gather related ideas.

    Save it

    Save your files naming them with the current date like yymmdd (for example: 100211) and you automatically create a diary or journal that is stored in the right order and with the exact date you had that brilliant idea.

    When you consequently start a new file each day you can keep track of different versions by copying the lightweight .txt file of the day before in your new file and edit and save it.

    Control it

    In order to keep control over your growing archive of .txt files you can use a search-tool that you tweak to index your archive of .txt files only. In this way you will be able to search very fast and won’t get distracted by .mp3 files or house-cleaning schedules. To ease up the searching process I add tags to pieces of text that I think I might want to use or reread later. A tag like #(tag), as for example: #quote or #idea, doesn’t really work in the search-tools I used as they apparently don’t “read” the #-symbol. So I opted for tag-quote or tag-idea that is certainly indexed by all search tools.

    Screenshot of the results of a search in my .txt files (using Tracker).

    I put the tag on a new line and I add a few words that somehow describe the piece of text I am referring too as these words show up in my search results directly behind the tag.

    Screenshot of a text editor with tabs (gedit)

    Choose a text editor that supports tabs so you can open search results or other multiple files you are working on in the same window and quickly switch between them. These could for example be chapters of a book, a plot or character descriptions, quotes or articles. I keep always two tabs open; a todo list or notes file and a file with the tags I use so I can be consistent.

    Screenshot of the my complete screen.

    Most text editors have the F11 shortcut that will turn it into a full-screen productivity machine and with a default easy-for-the-eye background colour there will be no stopping you.

    Well, I can’t see a reason anyway.

  • Quote on Writing


    Conrad Busken Huet

    This quote reminds me that writing in the first place is something you just want to do – and as such it shouldn’t be aimed directly at an audience. Liberty is available if you dare to let go of your always weary “Lizard Brain”, as Seth Godin calls  it – the part that is always weary about the consequences. The Dutch journalist and literature critic Busken Huet (1826 -1886) apparently did well in writing freely what he thought, but by publishing it he created many conflicts:

    Zijn doel, als van ieder werkelijk schrijver – van de lyrische dichter tot de man van wetenschap toe – was zijn gedachten in een zo klaar, zo suggestief, zo adequaat mogelijke vorm uit te drukken waarbij het gelezen willen worden een secundaire vraag van zelfbesef en financiële noodzaak is.(…) Deze denkmoed, onafhankelijk, candide en wereldvreemd is de motor van alle veroveringen in het rijk van de geest en was ook de motor van Huets kritisch vermogen. Maar wie die gave bezit en wie er zo mee woekert als Huet gedaan heeft, moet afstand doen van het verlangen in ongestoorde vrede met zijn medemensen te leven.

    bron: Jan Romein en Annie Romein-Verschoor, Erflaters van onze beschaving.
    Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij, Amsterdam 1977 page 728

    My humble translation attempt:

    “His aim, as that of any real writer – from the lyrical poet to the man of science – was to express his thoughts as clearly, as suggestive, as precise as possible, whereas the wish to be read is a secondary question of self-awareness and financial necessity. (…) This courage of thinking, independent, candid and otherwordly is the engine of all conquests in the spiritual world and was also the engine of Huet’s critical capabilities. But he who posses this gift and who makes it profitable as Huet has done, has to abandon the desire to live in undisturbed peace with his fellow human beings.”

  • Are we really getting more stupid?

    Some people argue that there are too many easy distractions in our time. That we are seduced by an bombardment of entertainment on television, the internet and even in books and newspapers. Because of our acceptance of this mostly shallow entertainment we get less interested in more complicated issues, we don’t take the time to indulge into matters that take more than a minute to get into terms with.
    The internet is to blaim, and commercialisation of just about everything around us.

    I think that there is a great deal of truth in the argument, and yet I am unsure.

    People have always looked for easy entertainment, from listening to the gossiping neighbour to reading cheap love- or supermanstories. The majority of people have always been oblivious to the more profound thoughts of their time.
    The biggest change over the last decennia has been the growing accessibility of both the producing and receiving means of public information for a much larger age group. This means that we moved from a intellectual culture that was made by and aimed at persons of at least 25 years of age, to a culture where the participants are between 1 and 101 years old. It was for example not possible some 10 to 20 years ago to read thousands of articles, blogposts, comments and opinions by 12 to 20 year old people from all over the world.

    Today’s technology makes every kind of information easily available to everybody and we can all ventilate our opinion in many ways. We are free to choose whatever tv-channel we want and we can read exactly what we want the truth to be in the many articles on the internet, not just what we are supposed to read or listen to.
    The level of genuine interest in the more evolved and intelligent culture might still be the same, but it got company with the explosive growth of other interest groups.
    Bookshops truly start selling to the masses, libraries change ideology, newspapers get even more shallow. Yes, but one could also say: The truth is coming out. We are what we are. Some of us read great literature, most of us read detective stories.
    Should we worry about this or should we be happy that our real interest is visible now?
    We have the choice to be critical, the freedom to make up our own mind, and make decisions about what we want to read, see or listen to.

    Because that is what we need to do in our times of information overflow. We have to restrict ourselves to the things that really matter to us. A huge task indeed, as it is very easy to get seduced by unnecessary information, but what truly matters is available too, in large quantities. You just have to want to find it.

    (Picture by Flickr user chuckyeager)