Thursday, 23 January 2020
Some pictures of East Frisia/Ostfriesland
Thought I might show some piccies I took two days ago. I’ve been dicking around with them to make them look old, but as I say they were actually taken just two days ago. They are all of East Frisia/Ostfriesland, the part of North-West Germany I am in for the next two weeks (and have already been here for two weeks). I hope you like them. The church is in a tiny hamlet called Marienchor.
Tuesday, 14 January 2020
Do we actually need writers? And here’s the question: did Wimsatt and Beardsley, and Roland Barthes (who has to be French with a name like that) work as hard was Ernest Miller Hemingway? I bet they did. And I bet they didn’t bullshit quite as much, either
A few years ago, the following occurred to me (and I shall stick to the art of writing rather than any other art to try to avoid muddying the waters, but essentially what I say I think holds true for the music and the plastic arts).
I can’t remember the sequence by which I came to this thought. In fact, I can’t even remember when it occurred to me. (NB Unlike so many who like to lay down the law and pronounce that ‘this is’, what I am about to write is by way of merely being a suggestion of how we might view something, a suggested different perspective as when we consider what an object is we are apt to pick it up and look at it from different angles).
It struck me that when we read fiction (and here I am talking about fiction which treats the reader as though the reader has a mind and uses that mind to engage actively with what she or he is reading, not Da Vinci Code bollocks — and, no, I haven’t read it, so, yes, I am not qualified to regard it as literary cack of the first order, so chalk up two Brownie points of the thought crossed your mind), we sometimes come across a thought or notion which is not ‘new’ to us, but which is articulated in a way we ourselves would be unable to articulate.
It’s why we recognise it: we are already familiar with it, though in ourselves it has never been a defined ‘thought’. Instead it was more of a ‘feeling’, or perhaps something in that vague middle-ground where ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’ meet and are neither one nor the other. (Similarly, perhaps, like me you ‘understand’ something — what is going on in a situation or a theory you have come across, for example, but would be more than hard-pushed to pass on to anyone else your ‘understanding’, so pragmatically you assume you haven’t really ‘understood’ it though . . .
Sounds familiar? I hope so, because I can’t otherwise explain it.)
Then, on paper, some writer — in whatever way she or he might — lays it out, articulates it, defines it in a way we ourselves can’t. To try to give an example, I doubt whether anyone reading or watching Othello will fully understand his irrational, green and ultimately murderous jealousy unless she or he has themselves felt such made jealousy (which I’m prepared to believe is every adult alive today).
In the sense in which I am writing, the writer is not so much an ‘originator’ but an ‘interpreter’, and ‘articulator’, even (though it’s a bloody ugly word, so don’t take me to task) a ‘conveyor’, putting into words what we, ourselves (the reader) ‘understand’ and have perhaps for some time, but can’t ourselves put into words.
Just how my suggestion might be applied to music and the plastic arts I really don’t know, so rather than make a pretentious tit of myself, I shall leave well alone and not go down that road.
. . .
The above occurred to me while I was reading Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay The Death Of The Author — and, I now hear you say, ‘whoa, hold on, this is a common or garden blog, not a Sussex University seminar!’ Well, I hadn’t (I must admit) heard about the essay until yesterday, although I had heard of Roland Barthes. But I knew little about him, and I assumed he was just another of those tricksy Frogs who are apt to make us meat ’n potatoes Brits move smartly in the opposite direction, one of those tricksy frogs (French friends and readers look away now) who will intellectualise and analyse to death pretty much anything and everything from saying your own name to writing a shopping list and taking a dump, then publish it to great acclaim and wonder.
If we humans do it, they will obfuscate it: that’s more or less the routine, they’re built that way (and is my slip showing?). That was Barthes, I thought. (Michel Foucault is another name reliably able to strike terror into the soul of most stout-hearted Brits. What is it with these Frenchmen and women? Why can’t they simply boil all vegetables to death like the rest of us? I ask you!)
I can’t even remember what I was reading when I came across a reference to the essay, but it — especially the name, The Death Of The Author — was what caught my attention. I was (and am while her in Germany) working on this interminable project of mine about Hemingway, his pretty ordinary writing and his extraordinary rise to fame, and one thing I mention in it in several places is another essay about literature. It was — and still is — called The Intentional Fallacy and is by two US academics, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley and was published in 1946 as part of the then ‘new criticism’ movement in literary criticism (now no doubt old hat and superseded, as is the way, but some new movement).
Wimsatt and Beardsley’s idea repeats (what I understand to be — I’m very careful here not to pretend I know more than I do) one of the central ideas of new criticism, that an author’s ‘intent’ is irrelevant to evaluating her or his work. They were discussing poetry, but I can’t see why the view can’t be extrapolated to include prose writing.
In The Death Of The Author Barthes says, although he was writing 21 years later, more or less the same thing or, at least, something related: to the existence of a piece of writing the ‘author’ is irrelevant. The piece exists entirely on its own and has an existence wholly separate from its ‘creator’ (my word). That is not quite what Wimsatt and Beardsley were suggesting, but to me it seems essentially to be the same point: a poem, story, play or novel can only be evaluated as itself and nothing else. Details of what the author intended the work to do (Wimsatt and Beardsley) or biographical details about the author, or any other details extraneous to the work (Barthes), are irrelevant: a work stands or falls on its own.
Though my knowledge of literary criticism and its history could be written on the back of a small postage stamp (and I am careful to try not to give the impression I think otherwise), I must say that when a year or two ago I went into The Intentional Fallacy a little deeper (I first came across the term and its thesis at Dundee and vaguely knew about it and suspected it might be relevant to what I wanted to say about Hemingway and his work) I was attracted to it. Quite why I don’t know, but it might be worth admitting that temperamentally I rather take against all the ‘art is sacred’ crap and insistence that we should (it seems to me) genuflect before ‘the artist’ as something ‘greater’. Folks who do so might deny it but it does seem to happen quite a bit. So in that regard, the central thrust of The Intentional Fallacy and The Death Of The Author metaphorically solely putting the work itself on stage and leaving the ‘author’ outside in the foyer with the raincoats (or even having a crafty fag outside in the car park) is far more to my taste.
. . .
So far I have read several biographies about the old phoney (my description, other descriptions are available) and I am struck by how quite often the biographers speculate and write almost as fact what was — or, a favourite phrase they use — ‘might have been going on’ in Hemingway’s head. What is also noticeable is that once you have read more than one biography, you come across the same old anecdotes again and again. You might wonder why I mention it — surely, you ask, that is a given if these are incidents in Hemingway’s life? — but my point is that quite often, surprisingly often, in fact, the telling of those anecdotes are strangely similar.
I haven’t bothered with Carlos Baker’s or Philip Young’s because those were written very soon after Hemingway’s death (in fact, Young’s was written while he was still alive) or A.E. Hotchner’s memoir. Hotchner seems to have been something of a hanger-on, although this was encouraged by Hemingway who couldn’t do without an audience for his increasingly tall tales (I’ve mentioned quite a few here I think). From what I gather (from reading later biogs) all three are rather to hagiographic, especially Hotchner who from most accounts comes across as something of an arse-licker, again something Hemingway will have appreciated.
The later biogs — by Jeffrey Meyers, James Mellow and the five volume work by Michael Reynolds as well as Verna Kale — sound a more sceptical note and don’t, thank the Lord, take on trust all the crap Hemingway put out there about himself. (The guy was an extraordinary braggart and, as he got older, outright liar.)
Here’s a good example: in December 1922 Hemingway was in Lausanne reporting on the peace conference and, according to Hemingway, a fellow journalist had shown an interest in his fiction and wanted to see more. Hadley as due to join him there, but her departure was postponed because she had the ’flu, and when she finally went, she packed almost all the work he had so far completed (several stories and a novel in progress) into a valise to take with her. While waiting for her train to depart from the Gare de Lyon, she left her suitcase and the valise in her compartment while she went of to get a bottle of water. When she got back her suitcase was still there, but the valise was gone.
The accepted tale in most biographies simply repeats Hemingway’s account that when Hadley arrived and told him the bad news, he almost immediately took a train to Paris to see if there was some way he could track down the stolen valise and spent the next three days doing so. The visit also, he says, took in a meal with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas at which they tried to console him over his loss. His search proving fruitless, however, he returned to Lausanne. All fine and dandy, and a great anecdote underlining the dedication of a single-minded writer concerned solely with ‘his art’ (the kind of image Hemingway liked to portray). Except, according to Reynolds, it just isn’t true.
Unlike the other biographers, Reynolds took the trouble to do a bit of sleuthing, comparing dates in personal diaries and letters, and discovering that not only could Hemingway not have had a meal with Stein and Toklas (because they weren’t in Paris in December and didn’t return (from their place in the country) until the spring but that Hemingway didn’t return to Paris until January 1923, with Hadley.
Reynolds wrote his biography in five volumes and in the introduction to the second (Hemingway: The Paris Years), he makes a point of stressing that he chose not to include in ‘facts’ about Hemingway’s life which he could not verify independently. That doesn’t necessarily imply they weren’t true, but he doesn’t include any claims made solely by Hemingway. And one such claim is that he rented a garret room in a house (some accounts say an hotel) at no 39 rue Descartes (alternatively the rue Mouffetard, depending upon your source) to do his writing because the flat in which he and Hadley lived was too cramped. A telling touch is that according to Hemingway the Decadent poet Paul Verlaine died in the same house (or the same room, again depending upon your source) 25 years earlier.
The problem is that Hemingway is the sole source for the ‘fact’ that he did rent a garret room there (and, as I say, it could well be true). He wrote about it in his memoir A Moveable Feast but there is no other record of his doing so. Oh, and according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/biography/Verlaine-Paul Verlaine died ‘in Eugénie Krantz’s lodgings’ and according to a piece in the New York Times or his ‘shabby two-room lodgings’ according to other sources.
Of course, all three could be the same building, but my point is that it all somehow simply burgeons Hemingway’s artistic credentials. And it is difficult to square that claim — that because his flat was too cramped he felt obliged to rent a room elsewhere in which to write — with his other claims that he wrote in bed of a morning and/or that he spent his time writing in cafes. All accounts sound suitably romantic, but all accounts somehow don’t gell. Call me an old cynic, but . . .
I have also wondered, although this is not a point I have come across anywhere in any biography why, for a man who spent says he spent a great deal of time ‘working hard’ in those early years in Paris he produced so bloody
little? Even the greatest Hemingway aficionado might agree that the amount of work he produced for his first commercial publication In Our Time (upper case initial letters), much of which had previously appeared in in our time (lower case initial letters) was decidedly slim.
As a guy who in 44 years working as a hack, first as a reporter then as a sub-editor, finds it comparatively easy to deal with words, it’s odd that Hemingway, also a hack who turned out news stories, seems to have found it such a challenge if he was obliged to re-write and re-write his fiction again. Going by what eventually appeared in print — which to my mind is no great shakes by a long stretch despite the ‘critical acclaim’ — you do wonder what all the bloody fuss was about. But then ‘the fuss’ all comes from Hemingway. And, I must add, pretty much as always. Viva Michael Reynolds, who took a more sceptical view.
But it is late and my reservoir of bile is running low. Time to go to bed to replenish it and renew attack on the idiot another time when I have more energy. Anyway, I’d now like to retire to watch an episode or two of Cheers on my iPad.
Pip, pip.
I can’t remember the sequence by which I came to this thought. In fact, I can’t even remember when it occurred to me. (NB Unlike so many who like to lay down the law and pronounce that ‘this is’, what I am about to write is by way of merely being a suggestion of how we might view something, a suggested different perspective as when we consider what an object is we are apt to pick it up and look at it from different angles).
It struck me that when we read fiction (and here I am talking about fiction which treats the reader as though the reader has a mind and uses that mind to engage actively with what she or he is reading, not Da Vinci Code bollocks — and, no, I haven’t read it, so, yes, I am not qualified to regard it as literary cack of the first order, so chalk up two Brownie points of the thought crossed your mind), we sometimes come across a thought or notion which is not ‘new’ to us, but which is articulated in a way we ourselves would be unable to articulate.
It’s why we recognise it: we are already familiar with it, though in ourselves it has never been a defined ‘thought’. Instead it was more of a ‘feeling’, or perhaps something in that vague middle-ground where ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’ meet and are neither one nor the other. (Similarly, perhaps, like me you ‘understand’ something — what is going on in a situation or a theory you have come across, for example, but would be more than hard-pushed to pass on to anyone else your ‘understanding’, so pragmatically you assume you haven’t really ‘understood’ it though . . .
Sounds familiar? I hope so, because I can’t otherwise explain it.)
Then, on paper, some writer — in whatever way she or he might — lays it out, articulates it, defines it in a way we ourselves can’t. To try to give an example, I doubt whether anyone reading or watching Othello will fully understand his irrational, green and ultimately murderous jealousy unless she or he has themselves felt such made jealousy (which I’m prepared to believe is every adult alive today).
In the sense in which I am writing, the writer is not so much an ‘originator’ but an ‘interpreter’, and ‘articulator’, even (though it’s a bloody ugly word, so don’t take me to task) a ‘conveyor’, putting into words what we, ourselves (the reader) ‘understand’ and have perhaps for some time, but can’t ourselves put into words.
Just how my suggestion might be applied to music and the plastic arts I really don’t know, so rather than make a pretentious tit of myself, I shall leave well alone and not go down that road.
. . .
The above occurred to me while I was reading Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay The Death Of The Author — and, I now hear you say, ‘whoa, hold on, this is a common or garden blog, not a Sussex University seminar!’ Well, I hadn’t (I must admit) heard about the essay until yesterday, although I had heard of Roland Barthes. But I knew little about him, and I assumed he was just another of those tricksy Frogs who are apt to make us meat ’n potatoes Brits move smartly in the opposite direction, one of those tricksy frogs (French friends and readers look away now) who will intellectualise and analyse to death pretty much anything and everything from saying your own name to writing a shopping list and taking a dump, then publish it to great acclaim and wonder.
If we humans do it, they will obfuscate it: that’s more or less the routine, they’re built that way (and is my slip showing?). That was Barthes, I thought. (Michel Foucault is another name reliably able to strike terror into the soul of most stout-hearted Brits. What is it with these Frenchmen and women? Why can’t they simply boil all vegetables to death like the rest of us? I ask you!)
I can’t even remember what I was reading when I came across a reference to the essay, but it — especially the name, The Death Of The Author — was what caught my attention. I was (and am while her in Germany) working on this interminable project of mine about Hemingway, his pretty ordinary writing and his extraordinary rise to fame, and one thing I mention in it in several places is another essay about literature. It was — and still is — called The Intentional Fallacy and is by two US academics, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley and was published in 1946 as part of the then ‘new criticism’ movement in literary criticism (now no doubt old hat and superseded, as is the way, but some new movement).
Wimsatt and Beardsley’s idea repeats (what I understand to be — I’m very careful here not to pretend I know more than I do) one of the central ideas of new criticism, that an author’s ‘intent’ is irrelevant to evaluating her or his work. They were discussing poetry, but I can’t see why the view can’t be extrapolated to include prose writing.
In The Death Of The Author Barthes says, although he was writing 21 years later, more or less the same thing or, at least, something related: to the existence of a piece of writing the ‘author’ is irrelevant. The piece exists entirely on its own and has an existence wholly separate from its ‘creator’ (my word). That is not quite what Wimsatt and Beardsley were suggesting, but to me it seems essentially to be the same point: a poem, story, play or novel can only be evaluated as itself and nothing else. Details of what the author intended the work to do (Wimsatt and Beardsley) or biographical details about the author, or any other details extraneous to the work (Barthes), are irrelevant: a work stands or falls on its own.
Though my knowledge of literary criticism and its history could be written on the back of a small postage stamp (and I am careful to try not to give the impression I think otherwise), I must say that when a year or two ago I went into The Intentional Fallacy a little deeper (I first came across the term and its thesis at Dundee and vaguely knew about it and suspected it might be relevant to what I wanted to say about Hemingway and his work) I was attracted to it. Quite why I don’t know, but it might be worth admitting that temperamentally I rather take against all the ‘art is sacred’ crap and insistence that we should (it seems to me) genuflect before ‘the artist’ as something ‘greater’. Folks who do so might deny it but it does seem to happen quite a bit. So in that regard, the central thrust of The Intentional Fallacy and The Death Of The Author metaphorically solely putting the work itself on stage and leaving the ‘author’ outside in the foyer with the raincoats (or even having a crafty fag outside in the car park) is far more to my taste.
. . .
So far I have read several biographies about the old phoney (my description, other descriptions are available) and I am struck by how quite often the biographers speculate and write almost as fact what was — or, a favourite phrase they use — ‘might have been going on’ in Hemingway’s head. What is also noticeable is that once you have read more than one biography, you come across the same old anecdotes again and again. You might wonder why I mention it — surely, you ask, that is a given if these are incidents in Hemingway’s life? — but my point is that quite often, surprisingly often, in fact, the telling of those anecdotes are strangely similar.
I haven’t bothered with Carlos Baker’s or Philip Young’s because those were written very soon after Hemingway’s death (in fact, Young’s was written while he was still alive) or A.E. Hotchner’s memoir. Hotchner seems to have been something of a hanger-on, although this was encouraged by Hemingway who couldn’t do without an audience for his increasingly tall tales (I’ve mentioned quite a few here I think). From what I gather (from reading later biogs) all three are rather to hagiographic, especially Hotchner who from most accounts comes across as something of an arse-licker, again something Hemingway will have appreciated.
The later biogs — by Jeffrey Meyers, James Mellow and the five volume work by Michael Reynolds as well as Verna Kale — sound a more sceptical note and don’t, thank the Lord, take on trust all the crap Hemingway put out there about himself. (The guy was an extraordinary braggart and, as he got older, outright liar.)
Here’s a good example: in December 1922 Hemingway was in Lausanne reporting on the peace conference and, according to Hemingway, a fellow journalist had shown an interest in his fiction and wanted to see more. Hadley as due to join him there, but her departure was postponed because she had the ’flu, and when she finally went, she packed almost all the work he had so far completed (several stories and a novel in progress) into a valise to take with her. While waiting for her train to depart from the Gare de Lyon, she left her suitcase and the valise in her compartment while she went of to get a bottle of water. When she got back her suitcase was still there, but the valise was gone.
The accepted tale in most biographies simply repeats Hemingway’s account that when Hadley arrived and told him the bad news, he almost immediately took a train to Paris to see if there was some way he could track down the stolen valise and spent the next three days doing so. The visit also, he says, took in a meal with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas at which they tried to console him over his loss. His search proving fruitless, however, he returned to Lausanne. All fine and dandy, and a great anecdote underlining the dedication of a single-minded writer concerned solely with ‘his art’ (the kind of image Hemingway liked to portray). Except, according to Reynolds, it just isn’t true.
Unlike the other biographers, Reynolds took the trouble to do a bit of sleuthing, comparing dates in personal diaries and letters, and discovering that not only could Hemingway not have had a meal with Stein and Toklas (because they weren’t in Paris in December and didn’t return (from their place in the country) until the spring but that Hemingway didn’t return to Paris until January 1923, with Hadley.
Reynolds wrote his biography in five volumes and in the introduction to the second (Hemingway: The Paris Years), he makes a point of stressing that he chose not to include in ‘facts’ about Hemingway’s life which he could not verify independently. That doesn’t necessarily imply they weren’t true, but he doesn’t include any claims made solely by Hemingway. And one such claim is that he rented a garret room in a house (some accounts say an hotel) at no 39 rue Descartes (alternatively the rue Mouffetard, depending upon your source) to do his writing because the flat in which he and Hadley lived was too cramped. A telling touch is that according to Hemingway the Decadent poet Paul Verlaine died in the same house (or the same room, again depending upon your source) 25 years earlier.
The problem is that Hemingway is the sole source for the ‘fact’ that he did rent a garret room there (and, as I say, it could well be true). He wrote about it in his memoir A Moveable Feast but there is no other record of his doing so. Oh, and according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/biography/Verlaine-Paul Verlaine died ‘in Eugénie Krantz’s lodgings’ and according to a piece in the New York Times or his ‘shabby two-room lodgings’ according to other sources.
Of course, all three could be the same building, but my point is that it all somehow simply burgeons Hemingway’s artistic credentials. And it is difficult to square that claim — that because his flat was too cramped he felt obliged to rent a room elsewhere in which to write — with his other claims that he wrote in bed of a morning and/or that he spent his time writing in cafes. All accounts sound suitably romantic, but all accounts somehow don’t gell. Call me an old cynic, but . . .
I have also wondered, although this is not a point I have come across anywhere in any biography why, for a man who spent says he spent a great deal of time ‘working hard’ in those early years in Paris he produced so bloody
As a guy who in 44 years working as a hack, first as a reporter then as a sub-editor, finds it comparatively easy to deal with words, it’s odd that Hemingway, also a hack who turned out news stories, seems to have found it such a challenge if he was obliged to re-write and re-write his fiction again. Going by what eventually appeared in print — which to my mind is no great shakes by a long stretch despite the ‘critical acclaim’ — you do wonder what all the bloody fuss was about. But then ‘the fuss’ all comes from Hemingway. And, I must add, pretty much as always. Viva Michael Reynolds, who took a more sceptical view.
But it is late and my reservoir of bile is running low. Time to go to bed to replenish it and renew attack on the idiot another time when I have more energy. Anyway, I’d now like to retire to watch an episode or two of Cheers on my iPad.
Pip, pip.
Saturday, 11 January 2020
Building guitars in the back of beyond, in Esterwegen (a nice spot now, but not so nice for some in 1933)
Heinitzpolder, East Frisia, Germany
Well, now settled in for what looks like it will be a month. Simple routine: sleep until whenever, potter around, drink coffee, read (and write a little), have supper, go to bed, read a little more and watch Cheers, get off to sleep. As they say (whoever ‘they’ are) it’s not rocket science.
My sister and brother-in-law aren’t due back until February 4 and we (my brother and I) will probably not leave until February 10. Got a couple of duty visits to make (which I never look forward to, though they are no great deal) but apart from that it is just: do as you please. Might get into a bit of walking, but I’ll leave that at ‘might’ as I’m often a great one for plans which remain unrealised. The only thing I must bloody do — and I mean — must is get as much of this Hemingway bollocks done as I can, to get it out of the way. Still reading and — a little — re-writing, but it’s got to be more writing and re-writing.
. . .
Repaired my nephew’s guitar so I have a guitar (a metal acoustic) to play while I am here. The only thing which was wrong with it was that the handle of one of the machine heads had long ago broken off, so the guitar couldn’t be tuned properly. The head which had snapped off was the one with which you tuned the top E string, so all the other strings had to be tuned to that string. The guitar wasn’t particularly out-of-tune when you did do that, just a little, but I prefer a guitar to be as in-tune as it should be.
I had bought a set of machine heads in Bodmin and brought them with me, and set about replacing the old ones on Wednesday (we arrived on Tuesday night), but what should have been a straightforward job got a little more difficult when one of the guitar pegs (which hold the strings at the bridge) bust as I was easing it out. By the look of it it had previously been broken, then repaired, but by now it was in two pieces and useless.
I ordered a set on Amazon (and a winder to boot) which was due to arrive yesterday, but (as usual) became impatient and wanted some pegs now, so I googled ‘guitar shops near me’ to I could visit one and buy some. The closest, in Leer, 15 miles away was Musik Bruns, and I was all set for a trippette to go there on Thursday, but luckily then noted (it wasn’t very prominent on the website) that the shop was closed for refurbishment until February 11.
It was off then to my second choice, Gitarrenbau Massen, in Esterwegen, 38 miles away, which I had found in my search, so off I went on Thursday: but it wasn’t the guitar shop I had, without thinking about it, imagined it to be
but a guitar factory. Actually, Gitarrenbau was the clue and I had picked up on that, but for some reason I thought it would be a small workshop. It wasn’t.
The guy who owns and runs it — alone now because, as he told me, at 70 he doesn’t have the energy to run a business and is winding it down — was alone with a large showroom of about 50 guitars, a warehouse with I don’t know how many more guitars in their boxes and a workshop with the bits and pieces — bodies and necks — of about 100 more. (He doesn’t make them all, but also resells brands such as Fender and Yamaha.)
I told him I was looking for guitar pegs and he sold me ten and two plectrums for €5. Then I asked what was a factory this size — not big but certainly not small and certainly not just a workshop — like this doing in the back of beyond like Esterwegen?
In fact, it isn’t even in Esterwegen, a village of about 4,500 souls, but about two miles out of town (towards the main Bundesstraße 401 (which connects Oldenburg to the Bundesautobahn 31 to the west if you are interested, though I can’t imagine many are unless, of course, you are a travelling salesman, are lost somewhere in the area and have come across this blog by chance, in which case: Hi, but back to the main narrative). What, I asked Friederich (that was his name, but in fact it is his surname. I have since discovered his full name is Hans-Günter Friederich) is a factory of this size doing in the back of beyond (ganz weit draußen, though I can’t remember if I actually used the phrase)?
Well, he told me, when he was younger, he and his family built up a thriving guitar-building business near Dortmund (which is in industrial North-Rhine Westphalia). In fact, it was doing so well, they wanted to expand their premises, but found the cost of commercial land in the area was extortionately high, and (somehow) came across the present site in Esterwegen which was just a fraction of the price. So the whole factory, with his Meister (those he employed to help build the guitars), moved 140 miles north and never looked back. Rent was cheaper (I’m assuming they rent, but perhaps they bought the land) and it was a far nicer part of the country in which to live and raise a family.
I have to say I was puzzled by why in a factory that size with several hundred guitars, some finished, some in the process of being built, he was the sole worker. Well, he said, he was winding it all down. He had been selling guitars worldwide through his website, but was simply getting tired of it all and wanted to enjoy life a bit more. That makes sense to me. And did he also play guitar? No, he said, building them ruins your fingers.
. . .
I’ve just done a Google search and found this story about Friederich and his factory which appeared two years ago in the Osnabrücker Zeitung. It seems the business was started by his father in the village of Massen, near Unna about 12 miles from Dortmund, where they lived. Here are a few piccies nicked from the Osnabrücker Zeitung of the man at work.
Hans-Günter will have been seven at the time. Eight years later, the company Gitarrenbau Massen was founded and and apart from building their own guitars, they also imported half-completed electric guitars from the United States, can finished them off. The move to Esterwegen came 15 years later, in 1980. His father knew the area because the family had a holiday home there.
PS I might seemed to have acted precipitously by not waiting for the guitar pegs I had ordered from Amazon to arrive, as promised, the following day, but in fact I’m glad I did. I was able to fit the new machine heads and put a new set of strings on the guitar — and play it — by Thursday evening.
The Amazon guitar heads did arrive on time and as planned, but 683 miles away at home in St Breward. I had given my home address as the delivery destination. Must be more careful. I couldn’t understand why I got a message from Amazon saying ‘the item has been delivered’ when so obviously it had not.
. . .
Some reading this might be familiar with the name Esterwegen or it might just ring a bell. If so the two letters ‘KZ’ will make things clearer. The Nazis came to power on January 30, 1933, and just five/six months later they had established their first prison camp. In this case it was for political opponents (and why that small detail didn’t already ring alarm bells in the rest of Europe is baffling). Three years later it became a regular prison camp, although political prisoners well also kept there. After the war, the British used it was a PoW camp.
Here’s a picture of the Esterwegen KZ memorial:
Well, now settled in for what looks like it will be a month. Simple routine: sleep until whenever, potter around, drink coffee, read (and write a little), have supper, go to bed, read a little more and watch Cheers, get off to sleep. As they say (whoever ‘they’ are) it’s not rocket science.
My sister and brother-in-law aren’t due back until February 4 and we (my brother and I) will probably not leave until February 10. Got a couple of duty visits to make (which I never look forward to, though they are no great deal) but apart from that it is just: do as you please. Might get into a bit of walking, but I’ll leave that at ‘might’ as I’m often a great one for plans which remain unrealised. The only thing I must bloody do — and I mean — must is get as much of this Hemingway bollocks done as I can, to get it out of the way. Still reading and — a little — re-writing, but it’s got to be more writing and re-writing.
. . .
Repaired my nephew’s guitar so I have a guitar (a metal acoustic) to play while I am here. The only thing which was wrong with it was that the handle of one of the machine heads had long ago broken off, so the guitar couldn’t be tuned properly. The head which had snapped off was the one with which you tuned the top E string, so all the other strings had to be tuned to that string. The guitar wasn’t particularly out-of-tune when you did do that, just a little, but I prefer a guitar to be as in-tune as it should be.
I had bought a set of machine heads in Bodmin and brought them with me, and set about replacing the old ones on Wednesday (we arrived on Tuesday night), but what should have been a straightforward job got a little more difficult when one of the guitar pegs (which hold the strings at the bridge) bust as I was easing it out. By the look of it it had previously been broken, then repaired, but by now it was in two pieces and useless.
I ordered a set on Amazon (and a winder to boot) which was due to arrive yesterday, but (as usual) became impatient and wanted some pegs now, so I googled ‘guitar shops near me’ to I could visit one and buy some. The closest, in Leer, 15 miles away was Musik Bruns, and I was all set for a trippette to go there on Thursday, but luckily then noted (it wasn’t very prominent on the website) that the shop was closed for refurbishment until February 11.
It was off then to my second choice, Gitarrenbau Massen, in Esterwegen, 38 miles away, which I had found in my search, so off I went on Thursday: but it wasn’t the guitar shop I had, without thinking about it, imagined it to be
but a guitar factory. Actually, Gitarrenbau was the clue and I had picked up on that, but for some reason I thought it would be a small workshop. It wasn’t.
The guy who owns and runs it — alone now because, as he told me, at 70 he doesn’t have the energy to run a business and is winding it down — was alone with a large showroom of about 50 guitars, a warehouse with I don’t know how many more guitars in their boxes and a workshop with the bits and pieces — bodies and necks — of about 100 more. (He doesn’t make them all, but also resells brands such as Fender and Yamaha.)
I told him I was looking for guitar pegs and he sold me ten and two plectrums for €5. Then I asked what was a factory this size — not big but certainly not small and certainly not just a workshop — like this doing in the back of beyond like Esterwegen?
In fact, it isn’t even in Esterwegen, a village of about 4,500 souls, but about two miles out of town (towards the main Bundesstraße 401 (which connects Oldenburg to the Bundesautobahn 31 to the west if you are interested, though I can’t imagine many are unless, of course, you are a travelling salesman, are lost somewhere in the area and have come across this blog by chance, in which case: Hi, but back to the main narrative). What, I asked Friederich (that was his name, but in fact it is his surname. I have since discovered his full name is Hans-Günter Friederich) is a factory of this size doing in the back of beyond (ganz weit draußen, though I can’t remember if I actually used the phrase)?
Well, he told me, when he was younger, he and his family built up a thriving guitar-building business near Dortmund (which is in industrial North-Rhine Westphalia). In fact, it was doing so well, they wanted to expand their premises, but found the cost of commercial land in the area was extortionately high, and (somehow) came across the present site in Esterwegen which was just a fraction of the price. So the whole factory, with his Meister (those he employed to help build the guitars), moved 140 miles north and never looked back. Rent was cheaper (I’m assuming they rent, but perhaps they bought the land) and it was a far nicer part of the country in which to live and raise a family.
I have to say I was puzzled by why in a factory that size with several hundred guitars, some finished, some in the process of being built, he was the sole worker. Well, he said, he was winding it all down. He had been selling guitars worldwide through his website, but was simply getting tired of it all and wanted to enjoy life a bit more. That makes sense to me. And did he also play guitar? No, he said, building them ruins your fingers.
. . .
I’ve just done a Google search and found this story about Friederich and his factory which appeared two years ago in the Osnabrücker Zeitung. It seems the business was started by his father in the village of Massen, near Unna about 12 miles from Dortmund, where they lived. Here are a few piccies nicked from the Osnabrücker Zeitung of the man at work.
Hans-Günter will have been seven at the time. Eight years later, the company Gitarrenbau Massen was founded and and apart from building their own guitars, they also imported half-completed electric guitars from the United States, can finished them off. The move to Esterwegen came 15 years later, in 1980. His father knew the area because the family had a holiday home there.
PS I might seemed to have acted precipitously by not waiting for the guitar pegs I had ordered from Amazon to arrive, as promised, the following day, but in fact I’m glad I did. I was able to fit the new machine heads and put a new set of strings on the guitar — and play it — by Thursday evening.
The Amazon guitar heads did arrive on time and as planned, but 683 miles away at home in St Breward. I had given my home address as the delivery destination. Must be more careful. I couldn’t understand why I got a message from Amazon saying ‘the item has been delivered’ when so obviously it had not.
. . .
Some reading this might be familiar with the name Esterwegen or it might just ring a bell. If so the two letters ‘KZ’ will make things clearer. The Nazis came to power on January 30, 1933, and just five/six months later they had established their first prison camp. In this case it was for political opponents (and why that small detail didn’t already ring alarm bells in the rest of Europe is baffling). Three years later it became a regular prison camp, although political prisoners well also kept there. After the war, the British used it was a PoW camp.
Here’s a picture of the Esterwegen KZ memorial:
Monday, 6 January 2020
Germany here I come (as, I hope, is the conclusion of this bloody project of mine)
Bodmin to London train:
Off on my travels again, this time to the Fatherland for a spot of nominal housesitting for my sister. She and my brother-in-law are off to El Salvador for three weeks on what seems to have become an annual trip. A former colleague of my brother-in-law decided to stay in El Salvador when he had worked there for a while and was posted away, and he and his wife have a beach house where my sister and her husband will be staying.
The ‘housesitting’ in Germany at Heinitzpolder (I’m going with my younger brother — younger being a relative term, mind, as he won’t see 59 again) simply entails making sure the six or seven chickens our sister has taken to looking after (don’t quite think that is the word, but you know what I man) are tucked up in bed at night and safe from Reynard, the fox. (I was about to write that ‘this being Germany, it is probably Reinhart, der Fuchs, but I bothered to look it up and the Germanys actually well him ‘Reinicke’. Well! I bet that nugget has made your day. It has mine.)
It will be good to get away, because I am still finding it odd getting used to ‘being retired’. I’ve asked other folk who are around my age or a bit younger but retired, and it seems it is rather usual. The feeling is hard to describe, which is why when you do chat to someone who also feels it, it is a relief. I should imagine it simply comes down to the whole structure of your life changing fundamentally. Except for those six silly months when I worked two three-month contracts on the Plymouth Evening Herald), I’d been commuting to London from St Breward for several days a week since January 1995 — 28 bloody years — although, as other old codgers will tell you, 28 years at our age doesn’t seem quite as long as it does when you are 30 or 40 years younger (and is a bloody eternity to a teenager), it is still 28 years. So I’m hoping getting away — and for three weeks, no more of these ten-day breaks I’ve been treating myself to while I was still working — will . . . Well, will what? Help me settle into retirement a little more.
It’s not a question ‘of having something to do’, either to ‘keep you busy’. Surely, once you retire the end of that sentence is logically ‘. . . till you die’, though no one says it. There’s plenty I want to do — and shall do — and I have to say this odd feeling abates a little if I have spent the day writing. Why, I really couldn’t tell you, but then I’m not particularly interested in the ‘why’ just the ‘it does’.
I plan (and you know how much God laughs when you tell him your plans) is to break the back of this bloody Hemingway project and finally get it out of the way. The main point of it is to do it, to complete it, to do all the background ‘research’ (which in my case comes down to reading) and to do it as well as I can possibly do it. Ironically, it has nothing to do with Hemingway at all. I don’t much like his work and after reading — what is it? — at least four or five direct biographies of the man as well as several other books, I find him irritating beyond belief. I like to think that he would have hated me on sight because I sure as hell know I would have hated him on sight, the big phoney. I mustn’t, however, allow my feelings to get in the way of what I write.
As it happens (I started writing, though certainly not every day, about July 2018) I had already completed 15,000 but then decided, well, then realised, most of it was bollocks, so I started again, though I am still reading through those 15,000 words, or rather dipping in, to see if there is anything I might salvage. And as I am not doing any ‘original research’, and don’t want to, it seems to me to be rather pointless simply to rehash the biogs I’ve been reading into a kind of Readers Digest version. I now plan to write what will amount to a series of different essays looking at different facets of his rise to literary celebrity and, given my conviction that he isn’t half as good as many still believe, looking at quite how and why he reached such an exalted status.
I’ve just had to resist the temptation to rehearse what I am going to say (none of it particularly astonishing) but it boils down to Hemingway being, as they say, in the right place at the right time and the right kind of personality for the role. That makes it sound as though it were all planned out, and, of course, it wasn’t. He was personally something of a one-off (and it now seems probably bi-polar) and ‘larger than life’ though in recent years I’ve taken the phrase to mean ‘a pain in the arse’. There’s a great quote from Damon Runyon about Hemingway: ‘Few men can stand the strain of relaxing with him over an extended period.’ He really was a handful.
Anyway, I want to and have got to put in the work (though work is never work when you enjoy it) of getting it bloody finished, so I can get on with other things and finally put my money where my mouth is.
. . .
While I am in Germany, I might take off for a day or two to Hamburg to see cousin Sylvia and her nieces (well, I suppose they are also my nieces, too) Maya and Inga. On the other hand I might not. I’ve always found you relax more on holiday if you don’t plan ahead. I mean I can’t get my head around all those folk who write long lists of churches, museums and sites they want to visit. What is the point? Play it by ear. It also occurs to me that talk of ‘relaxing’ might seem a bit odd when discussing the life of someone who is now retired, but I’m sure you get my point.
Wish me a good time.
PS Still getting an unusual number of visitors to this blog from Turkey and, recently, Ukraine. Quite why I don’t know. I suspect, in the case of Turkey, my past less than complimentary comments about would-be hard man Erdogan has attracted the attention of those in Turkey who keep an eye on ‘undesirables’. But it’s probably all done my algorithm, so they aren’t visitors as such.
Off on my travels again, this time to the Fatherland for a spot of nominal housesitting for my sister. She and my brother-in-law are off to El Salvador for three weeks on what seems to have become an annual trip. A former colleague of my brother-in-law decided to stay in El Salvador when he had worked there for a while and was posted away, and he and his wife have a beach house where my sister and her husband will be staying.
The ‘housesitting’ in Germany at Heinitzpolder (I’m going with my younger brother — younger being a relative term, mind, as he won’t see 59 again) simply entails making sure the six or seven chickens our sister has taken to looking after (don’t quite think that is the word, but you know what I man) are tucked up in bed at night and safe from Reynard, the fox. (I was about to write that ‘this being Germany, it is probably Reinhart, der Fuchs, but I bothered to look it up and the Germanys actually well him ‘Reinicke’. Well! I bet that nugget has made your day. It has mine.)
It will be good to get away, because I am still finding it odd getting used to ‘being retired’. I’ve asked other folk who are around my age or a bit younger but retired, and it seems it is rather usual. The feeling is hard to describe, which is why when you do chat to someone who also feels it, it is a relief. I should imagine it simply comes down to the whole structure of your life changing fundamentally. Except for those six silly months when I worked two three-month contracts on the Plymouth Evening Herald), I’d been commuting to London from St Breward for several days a week since January 1995 — 28 bloody years — although, as other old codgers will tell you, 28 years at our age doesn’t seem quite as long as it does when you are 30 or 40 years younger (and is a bloody eternity to a teenager), it is still 28 years. So I’m hoping getting away — and for three weeks, no more of these ten-day breaks I’ve been treating myself to while I was still working — will . . . Well, will what? Help me settle into retirement a little more.
It’s not a question ‘of having something to do’, either to ‘keep you busy’. Surely, once you retire the end of that sentence is logically ‘. . . till you die’, though no one says it. There’s plenty I want to do — and shall do — and I have to say this odd feeling abates a little if I have spent the day writing. Why, I really couldn’t tell you, but then I’m not particularly interested in the ‘why’ just the ‘it does’.
I plan (and you know how much God laughs when you tell him your plans) is to break the back of this bloody Hemingway project and finally get it out of the way. The main point of it is to do it, to complete it, to do all the background ‘research’ (which in my case comes down to reading) and to do it as well as I can possibly do it. Ironically, it has nothing to do with Hemingway at all. I don’t much like his work and after reading — what is it? — at least four or five direct biographies of the man as well as several other books, I find him irritating beyond belief. I like to think that he would have hated me on sight because I sure as hell know I would have hated him on sight, the big phoney. I mustn’t, however, allow my feelings to get in the way of what I write.
As it happens (I started writing, though certainly not every day, about July 2018) I had already completed 15,000 but then decided, well, then realised, most of it was bollocks, so I started again, though I am still reading through those 15,000 words, or rather dipping in, to see if there is anything I might salvage. And as I am not doing any ‘original research’, and don’t want to, it seems to me to be rather pointless simply to rehash the biogs I’ve been reading into a kind of Readers Digest version. I now plan to write what will amount to a series of different essays looking at different facets of his rise to literary celebrity and, given my conviction that he isn’t half as good as many still believe, looking at quite how and why he reached such an exalted status.
I’ve just had to resist the temptation to rehearse what I am going to say (none of it particularly astonishing) but it boils down to Hemingway being, as they say, in the right place at the right time and the right kind of personality for the role. That makes it sound as though it were all planned out, and, of course, it wasn’t. He was personally something of a one-off (and it now seems probably bi-polar) and ‘larger than life’ though in recent years I’ve taken the phrase to mean ‘a pain in the arse’. There’s a great quote from Damon Runyon about Hemingway: ‘Few men can stand the strain of relaxing with him over an extended period.’ He really was a handful.
Anyway, I want to and have got to put in the work (though work is never work when you enjoy it) of getting it bloody finished, so I can get on with other things and finally put my money where my mouth is.
. . .
While I am in Germany, I might take off for a day or two to Hamburg to see cousin Sylvia and her nieces (well, I suppose they are also my nieces, too) Maya and Inga. On the other hand I might not. I’ve always found you relax more on holiday if you don’t plan ahead. I mean I can’t get my head around all those folk who write long lists of churches, museums and sites they want to visit. What is the point? Play it by ear. It also occurs to me that talk of ‘relaxing’ might seem a bit odd when discussing the life of someone who is now retired, but I’m sure you get my point.
Wish me a good time.
PS Still getting an unusual number of visitors to this blog from Turkey and, recently, Ukraine. Quite why I don’t know. I suspect, in the case of Turkey, my past less than complimentary comments about would-be hard man Erdogan has attracted the attention of those in Turkey who keep an eye on ‘undesirables’. But it’s probably all done my algorithm, so they aren’t visitors as such.
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