Andrew's Hooligan Notes

Strategies/Techniques

• He walks behind her in the slow rhythm of the past. Describe someone’s gesture with a metaphor to something intangible. Don’t get caught up in detailing the physicality, the physical can be more powerful when paired with the abstract.

• Page 49, explanation of the Romania trip finally revealed. Withhold logistics, expository explanations, for a while, so that they don’t seem forced into the moment. Keep them concise. Reader will go with you without the logistics for a while if scenes are strong. 

• Decision is a moment of insanity, Kierkegaard confided. So was indecision. […and later…]

In the struggle between yourself and the world, you must side with the world, was Kafka’s advice. Had I heeded his counsel? Aphorism the narrator has memorized followed by a personal challenge to it. Make it new this way. Works best in interior thought.

• The very picture of an impeccably dressed young gentleman, intent on respectability. Intent on (noun that describes character’s attitude).

• with the kindness and calm that belonged to other times, she insisted that I take off my coat, warm myself, and have something to eat. the (noun character trait) that belonged to (historical era, time in a person’s life, geographical region, etc).

• “Passport Please.” Army voice, army manner. Dialogue technique: no traditional “he said” speech tag. Just report succinctly on tone and style of person. Works especially well for peripheral characters.

Loved Phrases or Ideas

• the fatigue of being oneself. Beautiful.

• Again, a victim? The idea exasperated me, I must admit. Oh, not again, the whinings and jeremiads of the victim, especially now, when all and sundry are claiming their own threadbare badge of vicitimhood —men, women, bisexuals, Buddhists, the obese, cyclists… The tension between the desire to have your suffering acknowledged and the desire to resist categorization as a victim. Also, the oversaturation of the contemporary socio-political sphere with victimhood, a la identity politics.

• the inner nature of the artist, ill equipped for everyday life, a bungler who dreams of other rules and rewards, and looks for solitary compensations for the role he has been saddled with whether he likes it or not.

• The story is too complicated, it can be told only in aphorisms.

• I’m preaching not to change others but so that I can stay unchanged, a rabbi once said. The constant performance and self-affirmation needed to sustain certain ideologies, dogmas, or faiths.

• a Law of Humanity: a man is someone who leaves behind a vacuum greater than the space he previously occupied.

• before it is this or that in terms of quality, life is ‘much.’

• ‘This is no life.” He lost hope. He was always a very clean man, so elegant and fussy, he wouldn’t wear the same shirt twice, he even had his socks ironed, imagine that. ‘This is not a life worth living,’ he kept repeating … ‘Yes,’ I kept telling him. ‘It is worth it, it is! If we resist, if we survive, you’ll have your clean shirts again. Let’s go on, just for that.’ The little things that break people; significance to someone of a minute part of life that others find irrelevant.

• Love starts out as revolution, then come the chains and the ambiguities, bringing in their wake the temptation of escape, escape from love, escape from family, escape from the chains. Let us, we pray, allow life to complete, in its own way, the work of erosion of hope and disgrace. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, life will usurp our illusions of perfection and erode the vanity of our sense of uniqueness.

• There’s no cure for that, for writing. Not even women; even less money; and even less, freedom or democracy.

• At that time, I was not yet used to irreversible loss. Wasteful of moments, I was also skeptical about the possibility of storing them in archives. Therefore, I had no tape recorder, I did not transcribe events, I did not preserve the voice and he words of the woman who was still of this world, alive, there in front of me.

• Other people’s hatred of us… does it render us more interesting in our own eyes? Victimhood as a point of pride, as a facet of collective identity. Shame associated with elevating oneself because of victim status.

• It’s nocturnal murmur wakes me up frequently, like a vagabond electric current searching for its outlet.

Words to Learn or Use

jeremiad

prevaricate - speak or act in an evasive way

raucous

implacable- relentless (unable to be placated)

anamnesis- remembering

History Notes

Iron Guard (Legionnaires) - nationalistic, fascist, Orthodox Christian party, 1927-early WWII.

Marshal Ion Antonescu- established National Legionnaire State in 1940. Toppled in coup in 1944 and later executed.

Transnistria- Romanian administered territory annexed by Axis from Soviet Union, occupied from 1941-44. Location of two concentration camps, and several ghettos/killing fields. 200,000 Jews and Roma people executed.

King Michael abdicates in 1947, start of the People’s Republic of Romania

Securitate- Communist Romania’s secret police

Nicolae Ceausescu (Chow-shesh-koo) leader 1965-89. Last communist leader of Romania.

Chernobyl nuclear accident 1986

Goloniad/ June 1990 Mineriad: government (FSN) suppression of anti-communist protestors

            main demand, that former communists (4 million) be ineligible for elections 

Two Thousand Years (1934), by Mihail Sebastian (aka Joseph Hechter)

Preface by Nae Ionescu, his mentor and member of the Iron Guard.

How I became a Hooligan, by Mihail Sebastian, (1935)

Emile Cioran (1911-1995).