Dear Yuletide Writer,

we share at least one fandom, which is great, and I'm really grateful you take the time and trouble to write a story for me. All the prompts are just suggestions; if you have very different ideas featuring the same central characters, go for them. Also, I enjoy a broad range from fluff to angst, so whatever suits you best works fine with me.



DNW:

- bashing of canon pairings or characters in general. By which I don't mean the characters have to like each and everyone - a great number of those I've nominated can be described as prickly jerks, among other things, and it would be entirely ic for them to say something negative about people they canonically can't stand - but there's a difference between that and the narrative giving me the impression to go along with said opinions.

- Alpha/Beta/Omega scenarios, watersports, infantilisation. Really not my thing, sorry.


Likes:

- competence, competent people appreciating each other

- deep loyalty and not blindly accepting orders

- flirting/seduction via wordplay and banter (if it works for you with the characters in question)

- for the darker push/pull dynamics: moments of tenderness and understanding in between the fighting/one upman shipping (without abandoning the anger)

- for the pairings, both romantic and non-romantic, that are gentler and harmonious by nature: making it clear each has their own life and agenda as well

- some humor amidst the angst (especially if the character in question displays it in canon)


The question of AUs: depends. "What if this key canon event did not happen?" can lead to great character and dynamics exploration, some of which made it into my specific prompts, but I do want to recognize the characters. Half of those I nominated are from historical canons, and the history is part of the fascination the canon has for me. ) However, if you feel inspired to, say, write Maria Theresa, space captain, and manage to do it in a way that gives me gripping analogues to the historical situations: be my guest!

How much or how little sex: I'm cool with anything you feel comfortable with, from detailed sex to the proverbial fade out after a kiss. Or no sex at all (case in point: several of the non-romantic relationships I prompted), as long as the story explores the emotional dynamics in an intense way.

( Josephus Trilogy - Lion Feuchtwanger )

( 18th Century Fredericians )

( Byzantine Empresses )



( Foundation (TV) )


( Lost in Space )

( Vikings: Valhalla )

Asked by cahn. This was Jud Süß (English title: Power), when I was in my 20s. One of my university classes was about propaganda movies, and in preparation for the infamous Nazi movie of the same title, several of us did a presentation on other fictional treatments of the life of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer; one of us talked about the 19th century Wilhelm Hauff Novella, one about one of the theatre plays, and yours truly about the Feuchtwanger novel.

Now, said novel wasn't Lion Feuchtwanger's first, but it was his big breakout book, which made him an international bestselling author, with a glowing review by Arnold Bennett in the Observer being responsible for the jumpstarting the English reading part of his fame. Feuchtwanger got interested in Süß mid WWI, wrote a play, - he mainly worked as a dramatist and journalist until then -, wasn't satisfied, and then in the early 1920s on the advice of his wife Marta went back to the subject and wrote a novel about Süß instead. In retrospect, one of the most amazing things about all of this is that a novel mostly set in 1730s Württemberg, dealing with an obscure bit of German history in one of the German principalities which has absolutely no connection to British history at all, could become a British and American bestseller in the 1920s. I didn't know anything about this when I started to read the novel in preparation for my presentation. I knew the Nazi movie existed, of course, but not whether or not this novel had anything to do with it. Also, I had never read anything by Lion Feuchtwanger before, and thus was unfamiliar with his tropes.

( And here is what I thought, with spoilers for the novel. )

3. Least favorite book by favorite author

I don't have one singular favorite author, but Lion Feuchtwanger certainly counts as one of my favorites, as I mentioned a couple of times, and I most definitely have a least favorite book of his:

"Tis Folly To Be Wise" is the English title, "Tod und Verklärung des Narren Jean-Jacques Rousseau" the original German one. Feuchtwanger himself wasn't really happy with it - in a letter, he described it as a novella which got out of hand, and which got stuck somewhere between novella and novel -, but the reason why I dislike it so much isn't that it's among his weaker works, plot wise.

What it is about, roughly summed up: not Jean-Jacquess Rousseau the person but his heritage of ideas and how they should be realised. Rousseau himself dies early on in the novel, living just long enough to shock one of the novel's heroes, Fernand, the son of Rouseau's last patron and a fervent admirer, by how unlike the sage Fernand imagined he is in person, how everyday human. There's something of a murder mystery plot - did Rousseau die of natural causes or was he killed by his wife's lover who wanted Therese to sell the unpublished manuscripts and make money out of them? - but that doesn't really go anywhere. What becomes the main plot is what happens to Rousseau's ideas. To wit, the French Revolution. (That most famous of Rousseau admirers at the time, Maximilien Robespierre, also shows up repeatedly in the novel.) Fernand starts out as the equivalent of a liberal who becomes disgusted at his fellow liberals when he discovers that liberté, egalité, fraternité ends for them where the money earned by slavery in the French colonies starts and no, by no means should the slaves of Santo Domingo be freed. While the liberal revolutionaries thus show themselves cowardly at best and corrupt at worst, the Jacobins, led by Robespierre, turn out to be the only ones ready to carry the revolution through by not flinching from bloody consequences. The deaths of Louis and Marie Antoinette are a political necessity. So, and here comes my main reason for disliking the novel, is the Terreur. When Fernand himself, as a born aristocrat, gets arrested despite being subjectively innocent of any wrong doing, his old friend Martin Catrou, who as opposed to Fernand actually is of the people, visits him in his cell and has this confrontation with him:

Sure enough, the first thing Martin said, 'I suppose you think you have been treated unjustly?' Fernand replied, 'I can see that I must have seemed suspect to certain people.' He could not resist adding, 'In any case what I think is a matter of no importance.'
'It is of importance,' Martin aanswered belligerently. 'If you think you've been treated unjustly you are guilty.' 'I have not been treated unjustly,' Fernand replied, and this he felt.
Martin persisted.( ...) ' Anyone who works for the revolution with half-measures is digging his own grave and that of the Republic as well. Oh, you gentlemen of learning!" (Martin) broke out. "You fainthearts! You desired the revolution, but you only half desired it. When the cards were down, when severity and terror were necessary, you turned cowards and took refuge behind your stupid 'humaity'! If it had been up to you the Republic would have been defeated and done for by now. (...) You don't understand us. Yourbirth prevents you from understanding the people. You are incapable of understanding them. And because your kind couldn't understand, you did everything by halves. Everything you did turned out to be wrong."
Then, remembering a former conversation of theirs, he planted himself in front of Fernand and without preliminaries (...) announced, 'I've drafted a new law for the abolition of slavery in the colonies. The Convention has voted for it. Slavery has been abolished and without any ifs and buts."
Fernand should have been pleased. He was not pleased. He was conscious of nothing but anger. Martin was standing there and rubbing it in. 'I took action where you and your educated friends failed.' And it was true. Martin had acted where they had merely talked, and slavery was abolished.

Now you might wonder why that passage disturbes me so. After all, it's plausible enough, and Fernand's ensueing rueful realisation that he just felt as the Marquis' son, taunted by the shopkeeper's son (Martin), and that his sense of privilege was far more engrained than he'd assumed also works. But the thing is: Lion Feuchtwanger, who was very insightful indeed when it came to Hitler and the Nazis and wrote a novel in which Hitler was satirized three years before Hitler came to power (Feuchtwanger was a citizen of Munich and thus had a front row seat in the 1923 failed coup attempt by Hitler & Co., which forms one part of the plot of said satirical novel), was not only wilfully blind when it came to Stalin's monstrosity, he'd even written a book (non-fiction) justifying the Stalinist show trials from the 1930s. And 'Tis Folly To Be Wise was published in 1952, a year before Stalin's death. It's impossible not to read this as a further attempt of justification by the argument of "historical necessity", with the France of the Terreur era standing in for Stalinist Russia.

Fernand, for what it's worth, doesn't die, Martin saves him, but Fernand, as mentioned in the excerpt not only is made by the author to agree that he hasn't been wronged by being accused in the first place, but also to admit that true progress can only be achieved in such a fashion. It's this agreement that I find most offensive, because it's a direct counterpart to both what the accused in the Stalinist trials and in, say, China during the Cultural Revolution (oh, and these days again) were made to say. What happens to them is just. They are guilty. "If you think you've been treated unjusty you are guilty" - that's Orwellian to the max.

Incidentally: I'm not fond of the entire subgenre of British and American novels which you could sum up as "The Scarlet Pimpernel school of thought", wherein the French aristocray are the poor victims to be saved by their equally aristotratic British saviors, and the entire French Revolution is solely about decapitation. (As Orwell pointed out, one Napoleonic battle caused more deaths than the entire Terreur era.) But just as Zhang Yimou's film Hero is disturbing and repellent to me because it feels like a director using his considerable craft to justify executions and totalitarian oppression in the name of historical necessity, so is this infinitely less known novel by an author whose books otherwise have given me a lot.



( The other days )

The success of the Marta evening was even more enhanced when the next day, we heard Bob Dylan was in town and had given a concert that same night. And still people came to the lecture instead! (BTW Marta liked Dylan.)

Friday was full of interesting lectures and panels as well. One was on Lion Feuchtwanger and translation, which included a lecture on his correspondance and close friendship with his American publisher, Ben Huebsch, and one on legendary journalist Dorothy Thompson who in the late 20s had translated Feuchtwanger's sole volume of poems (he was a novelist and dramatist otherwise) into English. While most of us had heard the name Dorothy Thompson before, not many (including yours truly) knew any details, and her life turned out to have been a fascinating one. She worked as a journalist and correspondant in Berlin in the late 20s and early 30s, was so in love with the local art and literary scene that she sometimes saw five plays a week (and befriended lots of writers, whom she crucially helped later on when they'd become refugees), interviewed Hitler, wasn't impressed (the published interview and her sarcasm got her kicked out of Germany once he had the power to do so), and was basically the only American journalist reporting negatively on the Third Reich from Day 1.

Another panel on contemporaries had the same speaker who'd given the great Elisabeth Hauptmann lecture at the last conference, who talked more about her and the difference between Brecht's female and male collaborators, one of the key differences being the power differential. Feuchtwanger had already been an established author when he befriended the young Brecht, and so of course his name shows up on the plays they collaborated on. Elisabeth Hauptmann was an unknown and a woman and thus her name didn't, despite her key contributions. (Among many other things, she wrote several poems for the Hauspostille, translated the Beggar's Opera into German which was Brecht's basis for writing his own version, the Three Penny Opera, translated Kipling into German which not only hugely influenced Brecht but again provided source texts for several of his own variations, and wrote nearly the entirety of "Happy End" and "Mahagonny".) This meant that when she tried to strike out on her own during the American exile years, she couldn't manage - she didn't even have a name in Germany, let alone the US.

Then there was an absolutely fascinating talk on Billy Wilder, specifically his years as a journalist and scriptwriter in Vienna & Berlin and then the early years in Hollywood as a scriptwriter before he started to direct as well. I hold myself reasonably well versed on all things Wilder, but the film who formed the heart of the lecture was unknown to me. It's called "Hold Back The Dawn" and was the last script Billy Wilder wrote without directing it himself; it's also the most overtly autobiographical thing he ever did, with subjects that show up in later films as well but far more verfremdet. Hold Back The Dawn predates Casablanca; it's main character is a European exile stuck in Mexico without a visum, and the scenes showing the situation of the refugés trying to get the US are among the very first in a fictional work. Said main character is also that Wildean achetype, a man deciding on selling himself in order to solve his troubles (being a refuge in 1941 being somewhat more urgent and losing your car, looking at you, Joe Gillis) and doing so in a sexual way; he charms idealistic American teacher Emmy into marrying him so he can get across the border, fully attending to dump her later on and start life with his dancing partner, for our hero, in addition to being a reporter and wannabe scriptwriter, also, like Wilder, supported himself partially as an Eintänzer (more polite term for Gigolo in a dancing hall) when the cash wasn't there. Also like many a Wilder main character, the pretense becomes real later as idealistic Emmy wins him over by still helping him against the immigration police despite by then realising the truth. There is a first person framing narration which opens with the main character pitching his story at the Paramount Studios. This was rivetting stuff for movie buffs like yours truly, as well as being very interesting from different-ways-to-be-an-exile point of view.

Another highlight of the day for me was having a personal "Eureka!" moment during the panel on Lion Feuchtwanger's brother Ludwig, who as opposed to Lion the novelist was a publisher/editor and historian during the Weimar Republic, and also as opposed to Lion at first remained in Germany, which nearly got him killed - after the Reichskristallnacht in 1938, he was among the Jews in Munich rounded up and sent to Dachau, where he remained for some weeks but miraculously got released and managed to leave Germany. Ludwig during the Third Reich years couldn't work as a publisher (of books) anymore and focused on editing a German/Jewish newspaper and on a series of articles and lectures on Jewish history; he also was working on a magnum opus about Jewish history through the millennia which never got finished and from which the panelist quoted extensively. Now, Ludwig wrote this at the same time Lion wrote his trilogy (of novels) on the writer Flavius Josephus, Josef ben Matthias, and the Ludwig manuscript contains extensive criticism of the historical novel as a form to talk about history, its psychologizing and specifically says it should not deal with the Jewish-Roman war (which is of course what Lion's Josephus trilogy does). Now, in the Josephus trilogy, there is a character named Justus with whom Josef/Josephus has an intense frenemy relationship; they start out as rival historians, and Josef is keenly aware that Justus is the more serious, worthier man, as opposed to Josef with his attraction to glamour, success and of writing about history emotionally as a historian shouldn't (but a historical novelist does, ahem). Their dispute/dialogue goes through all three novels and it's quintessential for Josef, but as opposed to Josef himself, Justus - whose criticism of Josef mirrors that of Ludwig exactly - is a fictional character not based on an actual historian. Because hardly anyone has ever read what Feuchtwanger's brother Ludwig wrote (it only started to get republished, or published at all, in the last two years), no one has ever made the Josef-Justus, Lion-Ludwig connection, but listening to the quotes it seemed brilliantly obvious to me and I sat up and went "Heureka!"

Today is the final day of the conference, day Three. I can't wait what it will bring!

The conference is over, and the APs duly collected me to continue our trip. The only reason why you're not getting Las Vegas and Bryce Canyon pic spams is that photobucket warned me I nearly maxed my monthly bandwith. Which is why further uploads must wait until October 2nd, alas.

However: some conference thoughts. It was great fun, full of lively debates, and quite international in ways that meant more than just Germans and Americans. We had a lecturer from Senegal and one from Seoul, for example, both female, which brings me to another point. While the conference, hosted by the International Feuchtwanger Society, is of course primarily about Lion Feuchtwanger, there have always been presentations on other exile writers as well. But this year was the first where as many of these others were women as there were men. What's more, the presentations in question were immensely captivating and entertaining. I'd say the one on Elisabeth Hauptmann beat the one on Brecht by a mile. (I didn't know she lived in Missouri of all the places during the war, due to her sister having married one of the locals, and wrote an essay on segregation which she observed first hand when taking a bus while she was there.) Salka Viertel I had known about as a legendary Hollywood meets emigres hostess and scriptwriter, but not that she actually provided the family income since both husband Berthold and two of her sons did not. Nor had I been aware of how much her outspoken fight against MacCarthysm cost her. A female writer I hadn't heard about before the conference but nust look up now is Gina Kaus, who in her memoirs had this scathing comment on many a male writers complaint about Hollywould: "I never had time to wonder whether it was undignified to write for the movies. I needed the money."

The red thread through this particular conference was the exiles ' "To stay or not to stay?" question after the war, and we got plenty of examples of both. At one point, a (American) man around 70 rose and said: "Well, I can understand people not wanting to return to the Germanies then, but what about now? Because I was born in Berlin before my parents fled, and let me tell you, the way things are going in this country I wonder whether I could return! Also, they have healthcare in Germany."

And on that note, I leave you to take my trusty camera and my parents to another glorious sight of nature, to be documented in this very journal as soon as photobucket lets me again!

likeadeuce pointed me towards Mike Carey's The Unwritten; I've now read issues 1 - 16 and am certainly impressed, if occasionally nitpicking. (Not just in the issue where Mike Carey commits the arch fanfiction mistake of using bablefish for dialogue in another language, to wit, German. This is awfully distracting to a native speaker who has to puzzle out the meaning; in some cases, an English version comes later, which leads to sad sighs of "no, Mike, that's not what the German says, dear, how difficult would it ihave been to find someone who actually speaks the language to deliver those sentences anyway?") It's meta fiction, which not every write can pull off but Carey can, with creat commentary (and spoofs) of various great works of fiction. And how could I not love a story where the ultimate fiendish plan to be defeated is ( spoilery of course ) I hear you, Carey, I hear you. Never mind massacres, that's one of my nightmares.

There's also great black humour, as when, mid-arc, we find out what became of a minor villain: ( he's enduring a spoilery fate ). Now that is how you deal with the opposition. :) At the same time, the villains are responsible for some truly horrible acts, and Carey doesn't pull any punches, nor does he make those deaths harmless. As for the various uses of real life writers and works, praise and complaints ensue:

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (and, as the text often points out, Milton's Paradise Lost, with its connection to the same place of origin - the Villa Diodati at Lake Geneva): an unreserved yay. Central to the Unwritten's premise, with a resonance to two of the central character's origin, and I do love that when the Creature later shows up, it is indeed Mary Shelley's (very eloquent) Creature, not (impressive as it could be) the zombie-like version from various films. (BTW, Tom's "but you have a damaged brain! That's canon!" was hilarious.)

Rudyard Kipling: mostly yay. That chapter does some interesting things with various aspects of Kipling (poet of Empire, voice of Common Man, shock of son's fate with said fate literaly conjured up by him in now more than one way), and captures his diction very well, but early on when young Rudyard comes from India to England and is annoyed and jealous at the pre-eminence of Oscar Wilde there my suspension of disbelief suffered an unfortunate break because of the DATE. In 1905, Oscar Wilde was already five years dead, and the year where he went from adored playwright to prisoner was 1895, ten years earlier. And let's not go into more trivial details as his chatting with Whistler when the Wilde/Whistler friendship belonged in the 1880s and was long gone. Also, methinks our dastardly villains would be more likely gunning for writers actually advocating big social changes, like Wells or Shaw, instead of Wilde; he was evidently picked for the contrast with Kipling, but even so.

Jud Süß the film (directed by Veit Harlan, who doesn't get mentioned here, comissioned and supervised by Goebbels) and Jud Süß the novel (by Lion Feuchtwanger, who doesn't get mentioned by name but is refered to as a "Jewish dissident writer"): more yay than nay, but lots of nitpicking. To start with the obvious: bad German is no one's friend. If you want to add German sentences for atmosphere, then consult a native speaker. Or stick with English dialogue and put asteriks around it to indicate when the characters are speaking in German. Secondly, I do love the basic idea of that chapter, and yes, Jud Süß is an excellent example of fiction used as propaganda, a story tortured into its opposite, but: the film isn't actually based on Feuchtwanger's novel. Not even in a twisted way. It couldn't be because Feuchtwanger's novel (along with Feuchtwanger's other works), which had been one of the big bestsellers of the 1920s, making its author internationally famous, was put on the index of forbidden books and burned in 1933 immediately. (Having written the first fictional satiric portrait of Hitler in 1930 in another novel, Erfolg, will do that.) Now of course Goebbels didn't use the same title for the film by accident (he could count on people vaguely remembering that there had been this bestseller more than a decade ago...), but Feuchtwanger hadn't invented it, either. There was a novella Jud Süß by Wilhelm Hauff in the 1870s, and before that various fictional treatises, dramas, pamphlets, about the fate of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (who had existed, after all) using this title. What the Nazi film and Feuchtwanger's novel have in common is that they are based on the same historic person, but that's where it ends; none of the plot lines of the novel shows up in the film, not even in a distorted way. (Sidenote: which is not to say that Carey didn't do his research. The brief summary Goebbels gives of the novel in the comic is pretty accurate. Iin an interview at the end of the issue in question, Carey and illustrator Peter Gross declare that when actually watching the film they were struck by how well made in terms of craft it was, that they could see why it was so effective given that, and that if they had agreed with the ideology they'd have loved it which shocked them. Having seen Jud Süß as part of a seminar on propaganda movies, I know what they mean. It's a highly polished, well-paced melodram - Harlan was one of the best directors of the genre in his time - starring some of the best actors available in Germany, Werner Krauss, Heinrich George, Ferdinand Marian. As opposed to earlier propaganda efforts like Hitlerjunge Quex where the propaganda is served so openly and so ineffectively that it was an audience flop, here you get the vilest antisemitic clichés possible served with the plot mostly ripped off from Tosca and in appealing aesthetics, and people ate it up with a spoon. Michelangelo Antonioni - yes, the Antonioni - loved it and wrote an ode of praise when it was shown at the Venice Film Festival, which is something not mentioned in most summaries of Antonioni's life. ) One of the most chillling examples of a lot of people using a lot of artistic talent to create something in the service of a murderous ideology, which is why I understand why Carey picked it to begin with. As I understand why he picked Goebbels to appear as a character, as an example of someone telling a story to destroy, the murderous liar par excellence. Still couldn't help thinking "the art could actually look a bit more like him, it's not like Goebbels had one of the most unmistakable profiles ever, and also, uniform? In connection with Jud Süß? He usually was in normal civilian clothes when being the minister of propaganda and playing film mogul. Goering was the one with the uniform fetish." Lastly, the conclusion was a welcome surprise ( for spoilery reasons. )

Unwritten revisits some old stomping ground in that Lucifer, Carey's magnum opus, had the daddy issues written large when dad is actually the creator and you can't not be the creation unless you can leave said creation as a central premise. The leading man, Tom Taylor, who might nor might not be his father's fictional character Tommy Taylor (think Harry Potter as well as dozens of earlier boy heroes) grown up into reality feels accordingly generic, but then again, in a way, he's supposed to be. (In issue #1, the obvious comparison to Christopher Robin of the Winnie the Pooh fame gets made, but I'm surprised so far nobody brought up James Barrie and the really depressing real life fates of the children who inspired Peter Pan and the Darling siblings.) Lizzie who might or might not also be a fictional character come to life, by contrast, gets more and more profile, and Ron Savoy makes for an entertainingly snarky sidekick with a secret or two. There is no character I dislike when I'm not meant to, and I certainly will keep reading. Especially since more revelations about Lizzie and, hopefully, Sue are in the offering.

***

Something else I did today during many hours in the train was to listen to a CD that came with the latest Mojo issue - Let it Be Revisited. (The articles in the magazine that go with it contain nothing not found in a dozen biographies about the depressing last year of the Beatles and the recording of the last but one to be made but last to be released record. Other than claiming it's underestimated by fans claiming that Abbey Road should be regarded as the true swan song. Huh? Abbey Road WAS the swan song - the belated release of Let it Be didn't change the order of production.) Let It Be Revisited boasts of a good variety of cover artists, though, and is well worth listening to.

Two of Us: sung by John Grant, slowly and warmly. A version that brings out the tenderness of the song. My inner fan still insists this particular song needs to be sung as a duet, but John Grant harmonizes with himself, so there's that, and it's great to listen to.

Dig a Pony: sung by Dennis Locorriere. Good with the longing of the song.

Across the Universe: sung by Phosphorescent. The Beatles didn't actually play this during the Get Back/Let it Be sessions. They intended to, but John couldn't remember the lyrics anymore, neither could Paul who usually came through with these things, and when they finally were brought by a flunky, they had moved on to other things. So Spector later took the recording made for the single and remixed it for the record. The Phosphorescent version is excellent.

I Me Mine/ Dig It: sung by Beth Orton who sounds as angry as George must have felt. I actually like this better by a female singer, I think.

Let it Be: sung by the Amorphous Androgynous, who apparantly wanted to do Hey Jude one better and made this last for ten minutes, courtesy of bringing in Across the Universe at the end and going for the Great Goddess approach we go from Mary interpreted as the Madonna to Artemis and Athena and a lot of other goddesses of various pantheons evoked verbally at the end. ( Back in the day, the lines And in my hour of darkness, Mother Mary comes to me, whispers words of wisdom, let it be were interpreted as meaning everything from the virgin Mary to marijuana, and amazingly nobody seemed to have thought of the glaringly obvious, i.e. that Paul McCartney's dead mother was called Mary and that he was in a rather depressed state of mind when composing this.) It's a bit doo much for me; despite its hymn-like quality, I maintain Let it Be works best when played simply, one voice and the piano (or another instrument, but just one) ideally.

Maggie Mae: sung by C.W. Stoneking. This wasn't a song by the Beatles but an old Liverpool tune which was part of the back-to-the-roots attempt they were first going for, and Stoneking sings it in a 1920s vein which is very charming.

I've got a Feeling: sung by the Besnard Lakes. Liked it, but had a pang of missing the original voices here which I hadn't in the other cases except for Two of Us.

One After 909: sung by James Apollo. This one really surprised me. The One After 909 is a very early Lennon/McCartney composition (and when I say early, I mean they were teenagers trying impress each other in the first year after their meeting with sounding like the Americans they idolized; unearthing this one for the Get Back sessions was yet another McCartney attempt to lure John back), and instead of the fast Chuck-Berry-like pace of the original James Apollo sings it as a slow Blues song. Pretty amazing.

The Long and Winding Road: sung by Judy Collins, blessedly free of the Spector-ization that famously became one of the reasons named in Paul's lawsuit. Excellent vocal performance.

For You Blue: sung by Pete Molinari, more country than George's original, likeably so.

Get Back: sung by the Jim Jones Revue as a really hardcore rock song. That was a bit of a shocker at first, though in a good way - I mean, obviously it's a rocker in the original version as well, but this one sounds as the band might have at the end of a long Hamburg night. Definitely memorable.

Bonus track: One After 909 sung by Wilko Johnson, the pace more like the fast original but still very individualistic. Who'd have thought that teenage enterprise can be milked in so different ways?

The Lion Feuchtwanger conference in Vienna is going well; as two years ago in Los Angeles and four years ago in Sanary, going back to the academic world do debate a favourite author and his works (and some other authors while we're at it) is fun. Just one very cringeworthy moment: after Georg Stefan Troller, one of the few living emigrants left (and a decades long author and journalist of note), had finished his lecture on the loss of language via exile and the Q & A opened up, one member of the audience launched into a rant on how Austrian-Jewish reconciliation was only started by Kurt Waldheim and how everyone had been unfair to Waldheim. The rest of the audience reacted with disbelief. Frank Stern, who organized the conference, said this guy shows up on every reading or lecture in the city hall anyway, no matter the subject, armed with his tape recorder and bizarre remarks.

(Speaking of bizarre, there are also election posters for the FPÖ with the slogan "true national representatives, not EU traitors". Oddly enough, back when we had the conference in Sanary there was also a compaign going on, and sure enough there were anti EU posters advertising for the ultra right wingers under Le Pen, with the same type of vicious slogans. I remember the Mayor telling us how powerful they were in the area, though not Sanary itself. )

The part of the university where the conference is staking place used to be the biggest hospital of Vienna, before it was converted to a campus, and both a monument to Sigmund Freud and the house in the Berggasse where he lived is nearby. Edgar Feuchtwanger, who attends the conference, told us in his opening speech he was recently given a facsimile of a letter by Freud to his son Ernst (father of Lucian), who had already moved to London while his father was still holding out in in Vienna, and in said letter Freud talks about reading Feuchtwanger's novel Die Geschwister Opperman (aka the one Feuchtwanger wrote in 1933 as an immediate response to events in Germany, describing one particular Jewish family; he rarely has written so fast, and sometimes it shows, but it still very affecting) and how impressive he found it.

The debates I've found most interesting so far, but then I'm biased, were the ones about the Josephus trilogy (aka Feuchtwanger questioning himself "what can a Jewish writer do? What must a Jewish writer do?" through an historical example, Flavius Josephus aka Josef ben Matthias, who was generally regarded as a traitor and whom he very much identified himself with), and about Feuchtwanger's last novel, Jefta and his daughter, which has been somewhat neglected by scholarship so far. I also loved the lectures shedding light on subjects completely unknown to me before, like the Viennese director Arthur Gottlein who spent his exile years on the Philippines and then in Shanghai (no chance to make films for him in Shanghai, so the ever enterprising Gottlein instead founded a puppet theatre which was a big success with Europeans and Chinese alike), or the small exile community in Ireland. (Going to Ireland instead of leaving it in the 30s and 40s was a rare thing indeed.) There was also one lecture on the changing gender roles for women, who generally adjusted to exile better then the men did, and one on Lou Eissler, novelist, socialist and during the Third Reich years married to composer Hanns Eissler (he was her third of four husbands, and she his third wife, too, but even after the divorce, he literally had a room in the house where she and husband No.4 lived).

Hanns Eissler, incidentally, is also the subject of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum which we visited last afternoon, which was quite well done. (Complete with Chaplin's quote about the Eissler family being something out of Shakespeare, which considering what it referred to - Eissler's sister Ruth denouncing her two brothers, Gerhart and Hanns, to the HUAC not just as communists but "atom spies" - was fair enough. They also have the poster of the "justice for Hanns Eissler" protest concert conducted by a young Leonard Bernstein.

The weather by and large is lovely, but I only had short opportunities to stroll through Vienna, as the conference lectures cover all day. Architecture wise, Vienna always reminds me of Paris - both being given the 19th century overhaul with the result that there is lots of imperial building and not much of the medieval city left, if anything (which is why film makes always have to go to Prague if they want to show old Vienna). It's elegant but sometimes feels a little oppressive. But then you come across trees in bloom and feel like whistling clichéd waltzes again.

It was back to work for me, meaning the fabulous Feuchtwanger archive at the USC. There is a thrill about going through original manuscripts, letters etc. which is unique to libraries, and always in my mind connects to A.S. Byatt's novel Possession. Now of course I never made that kind of monumental discovery, but in addition to a lot of useful background material for my thesis written over a decade ago, I found, and am still finding, fragments of the past that might not have literate merit yet still tell us something about the people they hail from, and haven't turned up in any biographies. Take, for example, a letter written by Charlie Chaplin to Lion Feuchtwanger shortly after finding, on the middle of the ocean between the US and Britain, that his greencard had been revoked. To stake that Chaplin was bitter about this is putting it mildly. In interviews and in his memoirs, he was restrained, of course, and in time he and the US made up, but in a private letter to a friend and shortly after the event, you get an acid blast like this:

It is so wonderful to be away from that creepy cancer of hate where one speaks in whispers, and to abide in a political temperature where everything is normal contrasted to that torrid, dried-up, prune-souled desert of a country you live in. Even at its best, with its vast arid stretches, its bleached sun-kissed hills, its bleak sun-lit Pacific Ocean, its bleak acres of oil derricks and its bleak thriving prosperity, it makes me shudder to think I spent 40 years of my life in it.

On a less bitter note and more amusing note, you also get confirmation that Chaplin, for all his leftist views, was still a child of the Empire. Here he is, again to Lion Feuchtwanger, about having met Jawarahal Pandit Nehru (a genuine socialist, btw), the first Prime Minister of India:

I spent a couple of days with Nehru at the time when he was helping to negotiate the Korean truce. The day I visited him Rhee had let the war prisoners escape, and Nehru was terribly worried and shocked abut it all. Cablegrams were coming and going all the time I was there. I found him quite interesting; we talked a great deal about Lord Mountbatten and what a splendid job he did handing back India to the Indians – the mert of which I do not quite understand from the English point of view! He seemed quite a nice man but a little pompous, but then that may be the Indian manner.

....

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Some more pictures of selenak's Los Angeles adventures, as I visited the Getty Center yesterday:

( Picspam ahoy )

My first reason for being in Los Angeles is to attend to a conference about the writer Lion Feuchtwanger (same reason I went to Sanary two years ago); the opening day was today, and as this year's main theme is "Feuchtwanger and Film", that was what the lectures were about. The most interesting one presented a Russian film based on Die Geschwister Opperman from 1939, which had the bad luck of being a film about a Jewish family in Germany in 1933 (which is when Feuchtwanger published the novel, one of his most urgently written books)... and opening just a short time before the Hitler-Stalin pact. At which point it became politically inconvenient for Stalin & Co. and was withdrawn from the theatres, and by the time the Stalin-Hitler alliance was forgotten, so was the film. The lecturer showed us excerpts, and despite some changes made from the novel (the young idealistic Zionist daughter of one character in the novel becomes the young idealistic Communist daughter, the family's chauffeur is changed into a working class hero lecturing his employer's son on the big picture), it seems to have resulted in a very intriguing film.

Meeting fellow Feuchtwangerians I last saw two years ago in France was lovely; turns out I'm the only one who was given a guest room in the Villa Aurora (where Feuchtwanger lived, and where I had a scholarship in 1995) for the duration of my stay in Los Angeles. Which is great for me, because the rest of them has to stay in hotels, and the Villa Aurora looks like this:


( Cut for picspam )