Writing Fiction Instead

FreeImages.com/John Hughes

I haven’t written a blog post in the past couple of weeks, breaking my summer promise to myself to blog every week. There have absolutely been holidays that reordered my work week and project phone calls to plan and distractions entailing crossed fingers (whether the World Cup or otherwise).  But also, I spent some of that time, previously devoted to blogging, trying to write fiction instead.

Nothing big, or complicated, or even really good, probably.  But I had an idea that I thought would be great for a short story, and so I sat down to try to write it.  I wrote as hard as a could on real paper and in pen for the 30 minutes or so that I had at my disposal.  A few days later, I felt like typing, so I opened a new Word document, typed the sentence I had left off with, and continued on writing that way instead.  The story isn’t fully drafted yet, and I’m not sure where to go with it, but it matters to me that I had the idea.  A few days later, I had another idea for a story.  I haven’t started it yet, but the idea has stayed with me.

For me, losing the ability to have those ideas had become the most frustrating part of post-graduate school life. When I finished my dissertation, I felt empty of ideas.  No matter how much I read or what workshops I went to, I couldn’t find an idea I felt like I could pursue further. Any idea I did have disappeared from my memory quickly, which became especially frustrating because I had always been the person other people counted on to remember facts and scholars’ names and details of arguments.

I’m sure some people would argue that my idea loss has been symptomatic of something more serious than just blahs – whether that’s grief, a post-academic symptom that Lisa Munro has explained so clearly, or something else.  Maybe it was, but it also kept me from starting anything even as pieces of those workshops or readings made sense to me.  As Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in Big Magic:

“ideas spend eternity swirling around us… Mostly, you will not notice. This is likely because you’re so consumed by your own dramas, anxieties, distractions, insecurities, and duties that you aren’t receptive to inspiration… The idea will try to wave you down… but when it finally realizes that you’re oblivious to its message, it will move on to someone else” (35-36). 

I think of that passage often. When I first read it, a few years ago, it gave me comfort because I knew exactly what she meant.

But now, this one idea that I made contact with has persisted to the tune of over 1000 words and counting. I have dipped in and out of this idea, writing more, or doing the labor of typing up the handwritten words and editing as I go. The period I’m in now feels like the familiar point of academic writing that came after I had read articles and books and pieced together what other people felt about a painting or a theory and everything has been poured into my brain to mingle and interact and finally (finally!) produce an argument of my own.

So when I have time, I write. I have much more to write for this space about my trip earlier this summer., but I also have a couple more ideas for fiction writing that seem like they might push through to the page. I’m not sure how my story will end, but it feels like such a monumental leap forward to have these ideas stick around and to work with them as I am able.

Before and After: Francophone World Cup

I write this as I watch a World Cup match between Poland vs. Senegal.  I’m rooting for Senegal, a Francophone African country whose literature and art I have been fortunate to study. When I majored in French in college, it seemed like a logical continuation of the French classes I took in high school, and I believed, perhaps, that it would be all Paris all the time. Luckily, I had a number of French professors, even ones who taught the “all Paris all the time” classes, who actively refuted that idea.

At my undergraduate university, most of the French professors regularly taught and even published on literature from French-speaking countries far beyond France.  In one class alone, I remember reading novels published by authors from France, Canada, Senegal, Egypt, and Guadaloupe.  In another class, focused on “women in developing countries,” we more broadly explored Francophone and non-Francophone parts of Africa and the Middle East through literature and nonfiction writing.  For these professors, it was never a matter of France or the French language being sacred for its Frenchness; they understood how the language connected all of these countries and their disparate cultures together.  They taught us that it was worth examining the consequences of French colonialism and how French influence fused with local practices, for better or worse.

When I went to graduate school, I took a course in West African Art. We were assigned a research project, and it was an easy choice for me to look deeper into Senegal for a topic. I quickly found a book about art that depicts Ahmadu Bamba (1853-1927), a mystic and prophet who founded a particular Senegalese sect of Sufi Islam. I looked further and found a painter named Alpha Wallid Diallo (1927-2000) who had trained in the École des Arts in Dakar but chose history painting over the popular modernism of the day. I became fascinated by a series of paintings he did to depict Bamba’s life—they seemed to use the idiom of history painting, which was so familiar to me from studying Jacques-Louis David and other French painters of a century and a half earlier, to craft a meaningful political statement for Senegalese Islam. Senegalese culture in the 1970s and 1980s proved to be a mesmerizing cocktail of post-colonialism, nationalism, and an emphasis on the arts as a means of expression.

I don’t follow soccer regularly, but there’s something about the World Cup that makes me love it even more and differently than an international competition like the Olympics. Dropping in to watch matches incessantly for a month every four years means that I don’t have the context for this sport the way I would for baseball or football in the United States. I don’t always know who led the league in scoring or recently signed a huge contract—except for a few superstar cases, I barely know which league many of these athletes play in during their regular club seasons. The leveling effect of everyone playing for their national team helps me to enjoy the sport.  Certainly, there are countries that field national teams full of stars in other leagues, but there are also teams, like Senegal and Egypt, where the stars, who play internationally, return home to do their part in attempting to lift their home country with a World Cup victory and maybe more.

I finish up this post long after Senegal’s win over Poland, writing as Egypt concludes their loss to Russia and almost certain elimination from the tournament. The grief of the Egyptian fans is remarkable, as strong and fierce as the unmitigated joy that Mexican fans felt after their team improbably defeated Germany a few days ago. I first became fascinated by the World Cup when I spent the summer of 2014 in France; I vividly remember being on a tram in Montpellier that passed a bar where people of Algerian descent were watching the Algerian team win and advance out of the group stage. That summer, I was also staying with a Chilean woman who was deeply, deeply engaged by how well the Chilean team was playing.  I began watching matches on my own, trying to understand the rules and dynamics of the sport, as well as the different styles and characters of each national team. 

What I learned in those Francophone literature classes about cultures very different from my own expanded, at the time, how I thought about cultural identity and the relationship between culture and daily life. As I have traveled more and studied more, my enjoyment of the World Cup has become an almost anthropological act—I find joy in these soccer matches where the fans arrive in their jerseys, carrying national symbols, and singing their particular songs. I love watching the fans as much as the matches, and I especially enjoy when they cut to a watch party in the biggest square or park in the capital city of the home country, where everyone loudly cheers as if they're in the stadium themselves. Americans have very little stake in this tournament, even when we qualify and probably even when we co-host in 2026, so the World Cup is a chance to pick a team that plays enthusiastically for a country whose population hangs their hopes on that team’s success.  I’ll be watching, keeping my fingers crossed for Senegal.

Experiencing Erasmus at the Rotterdam Public Library

One of the most fascinating exhibitions I saw during my recent travels was also the cheapest—it was free!  In the Rotterdam Public Library, a building with yellow pipes down the side that make it look more like a factory, they have an exhibit called the Erasmus Experience, which focuses on the contributions of the humanist thinker Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), who originally came from Rotterdam.  It seemed like posters for the exhibit were placed throughout the city in places where interested people might be likely to find them—for me, it worked.

Exterior of the Rotterdam Public Library (my photo).

The exhibition focused on the philosophy of Erasmus and its resonance for the present-day, which is a lofty subject for an exhibit, especially in an age where people are resistant to reading large amounts of wall text. He wrote prolifically about the benefits of education and how, in the wake of the Reformation, every person could define their individual relationship with religion.  Appropriately, Erasmus loved words and language, and the Erasmus Experience effective spun words into memorable edutainment for the afternoon.

And so I walked into the Rotterdam Public Library, peering across the rotunda for barriers to entry or signs directing me to the exhibition.  I walked through a photography exhibit, through an area with a reference desk—a reminder that public libraries look much the same wherever you might be.  I saw a sign directing me up to the next floor, and so I hopped on the escalator. At the top of the escalator, I saw a kiosk display on Erasmus that used the graphics for the exhibition; inside a small niche in the display rested postcards with Erasmus quotes on them. I enthusiastically snagged one as a free souvenir and continued on my merry way around the floor to the next escalator.  Two more floors later, through the children’s section, and the romance section, I found myself staring at the alcove that held the Eramus Experience.

Screenshot of the Erasmus Experience website.

I had expected the space to be small, as library exhibitions often are, but they used the space well.  Exhibition panels lined the wall of the alcove, with all the materials in Dutch and English, and a desk-style bank of flatscreen monitors filled the center of the room.  The instructions clearly indicated that visitors should start with the wall panels and would end with the computer interactives.  However, before entering, the instructions directed me to grab a little yellow bracelet—it looked almost like a FitBit or a large plastic kids’ watch—and stand on a mark to have my picture taken.  The quick video and the sign (pictured below) explained that it would be my task to use the yellow bracelet to interact with the exhibit and collect “diamonds” for answering questions related to the opinions expressed by Erasmus.  Gamification in museums—turning a learning task into a game with tasks and rewards—can be risky.

Sign at the beginning of the Erasmus Experience.

My instinct is always to be skeptical about exhibitions that require participation because they do not often manage to sustain that engagement all the way through the display.  They ask too much or too little to really work effectively.  In this case, however, I found myself reading the exhibition panels and swiping my little yellow bracelet to get those diamonds, almost without thinking about it and even though I had intended this exhibit to be a short stop in a jam-packed day of site-seeing.  For example, a panel might describe what Erasmus had said about language, its rules, and its potential for connection, and the question it poses might be: “Do you believe that everyone should speak the same language in order to promote connection?”  The answers might be something like “Yes, I do because how else can we understand each other?” and “No, I don’t because we should preserve the integrity of individual languages.”  Answering the questions required thought and asked you to really understand why Erasmus held such beliefs.  The exhibition also did an excellent job of placing Erasmus into a modern context—for example, because he lived in a time when most scholarship and religious activity occurred in Latin, he understood what it meant for a group of people, regardless of national boundaries, to all know one language.  He understood the cloistered, classist nature of that shared Latin knowledge, but he was also willing to pose the question of what it might look if such a practice spread to the rest of society.  I found the entire exhibit fascinating, and I wish I could share the whole thing with you here.

After making it through the all of the questions and collecting enough diamonds, you proceeded to the center of the room, where you could explore your answers further.  A stylishly animated little Erasmus, like the one in the pictures above, interrogated your opinions in the style of a text message screen, occasionally playing devil’s advocate and pushing you to be sure you understood the consequences of your answers.  You could do as much or as little of this interactive as you liked, and I found that it further deepened what I had already learned from the display.  I also noticed, at this point in the exhibition, that there were cases filled with books, in the more traditional manner of library exhibition.  But even though the Rotterdam Public Library claims one of the largest collections of Erasmus writings in the world, they did not rely on the objects themselves to engage visitors. Instead, they simply offered them as a bonus for those interested.

I left that day excited about Rotterdam's museums, and excited to learn more about Erasmus.  It’s a shame that other texts on the philosopher—who seems extraordinarily relevant to today—are not as accessible as the Erasmus Experience exhibition was.  In this case, “Experience” was not simply a flashy moniker to draw in numbers.  The exhibition engaged me in his philosophy, provided a model for using technology to amplify learning, and incorporated traditional methods of display to emphasize the strengths of its collections. I saw a number of other museums and special exhibitions on my trip that tried to achieve these goals, but this is one of few that I’m still thinking about.

The Forgeries of Étienne Terrus & the Importance of Local Artists in France

A little over a month ago, news broke that a museum in Elne, a small town in the south of France near the Spanish border, had discovered that nearly 60% of its paintings were forgeries.  Many of these works had been attributed to a local nineteenth-century artist, Étienne Terrus (1857-1922).  Though the extremity of this revelation and its art market consequences cannot be ignored, this story caught my eye because I have been to a number of these local museums that proudly emphasize their local artist. The impulse to interpret this news as a tragedy of fraudulent goods and misspent funds misses the point entirely – the intangible consequences of losing Terrus as a local icon are more critical.

Étienne Terrus, View of Elne, n.d.

Terrus, like many nineteenth-century painters, went to Paris to study painting at the age of 17 and soon returned home to Elne where he remained, painting profusely, for the rest of his life.  Some short biographies on the painter suggest that his work had a strong influence André Derain and Henri Matisse, who visited the artist in Elne, as they began to paint in the Fauvist idiom. The Fauvist claim seems suspect to me—if they were attracted to Terrus’s style, it was likely partially a backhanded compliment of sorts. Fauvism, grounded in wild colors (fauve = “wild beast” in French) and a de-skilling of figural painting, would most likely have grown out of his LACK of skill or inspired experiments, rather than any unique contribution of the artist.

So the importance of Terrus comes down not to his “skill” or his actual paintings, but the fact of his locality. In The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France, Stéphane Gerson has outlined how local cults of personality and celebrations of local history grew enormously during the nineteenth century.  In part, he writes, this was a particular turn of public relations by the current elites of any one town—by positing a certain group of ancestors as elites, they would claim for themselves a measure of glory by association, by being the group of people who had stepped into the places once held by those hallowed forefathers.  Though there could always be a tension between local pride and unified nationalism, enthusiasm for one’s home town or residence could be a way of expressing independence under an increasingly modern government.  Assuming an artist as part of a local tradition could mean positing creativity and discernment as a crucial component of local character.

The focus on sites of local art production, then and now, also rejects the notion that the provinces could only beget mediocrity relative to Parisian finesse.  In many cases, celebrating local artists, whether or not they had success in Paris, occurred because a local académie, or at least a few skilled teachers, existed to cultivate a local art scene—its teachers and students might then be more likely to be retained to produce local monuments, decorations, and other functional pieces of art.  These local teachers provided foundational instruction for pupils who might then choose to go on to Paris, get elite training for themselves, and then decide whether to toil after Salon success in the capital or return home as one of the most skilled artists available for commission.

To go one step further, local artists are often dismissed on the basis of quality, with scholars declaring their paintings to be less accomplished than artists working in Paris.  I’ve argued repeatedly in other contexts that assessing the quality of painting is not as useful as putting it into its immediate social and historical context, especially when it comes to regional artists.  In looking at Terrus’s paintings online, they seem to be quite pleasant landscapes that are clearly influenced by Impressionism—he understands how to use his brushstrokes to build up trees and buildings and pavement.  Instead of the building styles of northern France that characterize landscapes by the primary Impressionists, Terrus’s landscapes evidence the majestic stucco towers that populate cities and towns in that southwestern corner of France.  The landscapes include local character while still utilizing the Impressionist color palette and not turning to symbolist colors, like Van Gogh, or even the brighter Southern palette of a Cézanne or Bazille.  Other Terrus paintings show more experimentation with colors and lines, demonstrating how a wild beast, a fauve, might be found among these tame landscapes.  (Assuming, of course, that the paintings I found online were not the forgeries.)

His importance to Elne is now the contemporary consequence of those long-standing efforts across small towns in France to claim their local producers and elevate them to the status of legend.  Because Terrus fixated on his own lesser-known area of residence, his paintings preserve the changes of that town over time and demonstrate how an artist divorced from the Parisian establishment (defined contemporaneously or in retrospect) could adapt the trends of his era and re-present them for his friends and neighbors.  This would certainly be a point of pride for a smaller city without a storied artistic tradition of its own.  The timeline of the town’s efforts to build up its local museum, and in so doing unintentionally acquire a large number of forgeries, coincide with the increasing decentralization of art historical investigations.  In other words, where it was once expected that a scholar would study artists working in Paris, its become increasingly accepted that scholars might study a local artist with a local following in a small city a bit separate from the usual tourist endeavors.  It makes sense that building up a Terrus collection in a local museum would seem like a way to draw tourism because the infrastructure for local artists to be deemed interesting has considerably increased – yet so has the potential for bad actors, like the “experts” named in reports of this fraud, to take advantage of a small town’s desire to stand out.

Rotterdam Case Study - Interpreting Damaged Churches

Since I’ve worked in public history and education, I’ve spent more time analyzing how cultural sites present information to their visitors. I recently travelled to Belgium and the Netherlands, and their museums and historic sites offered numerous strategies and interpretive choices to consider. With so much history in Europe and so much deliberate attention paid to it, I was interested in how some of these museums and historic sites cope with complicated contingencies in choosing how to package and display the past.  In Rotterdam, a modern city in the southern part of the Netherlands, I saw compelling ways of merging past and present. 

Grote of Sint-Laurenskerk (Great, or St. Lawrence Church), Rotterdam.  (My photo)

A city that was devastated during World War II, Rotterdam is a unique instance of a European metropolis with no qualms about Modernist rebuilding, both architecturally and in terms of the city’s reputation. They had no choice. As a result, the city is full of buildings that are intriguing both inside and out, and public art appears at nearly every plaza or major intersection.  Unlike Le Havre, a French city that chose to rebuild their downtown as part of a uniform plan from one architect, Rotterdam embraced the potential diversity of 20th Century architectural styles, and it proves to be a visual feast.

However, while much of the city was rebuilt after World War II, some major structures, like the Grote of Sint-Laurenskerk (Great, or St. Lawrence Church) were heavily damaged, but worth saving. Indeed, the Sint-Laurenskerk is the only remaining part of the medieval city.  After it was so heavily damaged by bombing, a debate ensued about restoration versus replacement.  They viewed the symbolic value of the church as a reason to restore it—it could provide a reminder of how the Netherlands had survived the war.  Today, it is still very much a functioning church, open to visitors and tourists outside of religious events. In my experience, functioning churches are not often masters of interpretation. For a church like the Sint-Laurenskerk, how would it tell its history of restoration in addition to its history as a house of worship?

Like many historic sites in the Netherlands, Sint-Laurenskerk embraced technology in their interpretation.  They had a neat interactive computer that allowed visitors to explore images of the church over time.  How did the church look in situ from 1700 to 1800 to 1900?  How did the artists of the city choose to depict it?  Though a fairly simple concept, this interactive is successful.  I think tourists, especially those without a background in art and architectural history, often have trouble imagining how such extraordinary buildings could emerge and anchor a neighborhood over centuries. 

One chapel—my favorite part!—had fragments of architectural elements from the original church displayed in a large medal grid, allowing visitors to get up close to gargoyles and pieces of columns while also impressing upon visitors the extent of the church’s physical and spiritual damage. The scaffolding seemed to mimic the height of the gothic cathedral, suggesting the extraordinary circumstances that brought these pieces of sculpture closer to the ground. It was remarkable.

Churches built in this cross plan tend to have small chapels lining the exterior walls that, at the time, were meant to honor specific saints or events or, more importantly, to engage donor support.  A rich community member might endow a private chapel and further support the church to show his or her religiosity.  Today, these niches are natural segments for exhibitions carried over multiple chapels or addressing a theme per niche.  And, more importantly, they capitalize on the original function of those spaces—private, individual contemplation—both to show visitors artifacts and to ask them to contemplate their significance as broken remnants of the structure that existed prior to World War II.  Beyond the exhibit of fragments, they had a “library” tribute to Desiderius Erasmus, a humanist thinker born in Rotterdam in 1466, and one chapel that used a comic book-style cartoon to tell the story of Antonius Hambroek, a missionary and Rotterdam native, who had been executed in Formosa in 1661. I think that the cartoon was meant to couch the story of Hambroek in the context of Dutch colonialism, rather than simply leaving the memorial below in place and uninterpreted.

These interventions allow the church to function as both a historic site and an integral part of a living community.  They didn’t seem particularly expensive (indeed, the church charged a very modest 2 euro admission to tourists), but they created an outsized effect.  Churches do not have to be empty of interpretation, relying on the quality of the architecture and enclosed art to draw visitors.  They can embrace the community and the less straightforward parts of their history to present compelling and informative displays.