Qui a tué mon père and an Amsterdam standing ovation for Édouard Louis

 

I meet Frédéric (a friend through the Amsterdam Queer Bookclub) today for Édouard Louis's new play "Qui a tué mon père" which was quite amazing.

I really admire Édouard Louis works and in my opinion, he is just getting better and better as a writer.

Édouard Louis first book "En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule", is a real shocker, it grabs that reader by the throat and never really takes its foot off the pedal, one hell of a ride and not for the faint hearted. 

This book seems to be a new genre that is very largely autobiographical, similar to the American poet Ocean Vuong, whose lyric style seems to accentuate the negative and shocking. Édouard Louis's childhood is portrayed in unrelenting misery, the principal villains being a nasty mixture of toxic masculinity and poverty. After reading "En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule", I did wonder how his family and especially his father took the publishing of this sensational childhood story?

Édouard Louis's second book "Histoire de la violence" is of a similar shocking style, he is a little older and the events are just as grim, very Hobbesian again i.e. the 17th British philosopher who maintained life is 'Nasty, brutish and short'. And yes, it would appear that there were some parallels between poor and working-class between 1650 and 470 years later, in 2020?  This regression in the quality of the life for the working poor, especially over the last 30 to 40 years, with neo-liberal and more purist free-market economics, which has hit the poorest in society hard, drives much of Édouard Louis' writing.

On a lighter note, if I remember correctly, I think there was a bit more humour in this second largely autobiographical novel? I need to re-read it to verify, but I remember it feeling very real but people took some absurd pleasure in the farcical nature of their lives

Édouard Louis now has a new play, focusing on the last few years of his father's life. While his father seems to be the victim of his own toxic masculinity, his wife eventually could not stand it anymore and he spend the last few years of his life in grinding poverty.  Louis details the repeated benefit cuts and how his father was forced to work to travel long distances and work as a street cleaner (barely covering his travel costs) until his health failed him. A very raw account of the harsh reality of the populist "back to work schemes" of the last few decades. On a more everyday level, he portrayed a more balanced relationship with his father, who was also very loving and proud of his son, even if he rarely showed it. His father seems to have had toxic masculinity in spades and he was sometimes his own worst enemy? 

Anyway, today was a very special performance for me, I had assumed that some actor would be performing today. I didn't realize Édouard Louis was actually performing his latest play until after the play had actually started and then I had this crazy dawning realization: that guy looks like quite Édouard Louis. I had seen a few photos of him, but I was more interested in books than his looks (although he is quite handsome), but then I thought this guy really sounds like Édouard Louis and I had heard him give radio interviews, plus I had listened (twice through), to the audiolib.fr french version of Qui a tué mon père, read by Édouard Louis ... so then I realized this guy actually is Édouard Louis ... OMG!

To see him perform live was simply incredible, a remarkable writer, performer and event. Édouard Louis received a standing ovation for his performance today.

Omicron vs the Common Cold and Best Wishes to the Queen

It seems to me that that covid i.e. omicron is nearly everywhere now,

and it is inevitable that even the most vulnerable i.e. elderly are going to be very hard to protect.

My first concern is naturally my parents,

my Mum is 80 and clearly suffering from various conditions related

to old age (toothache and a nasty rash recently) but is in general in robust health physical health.

My biggest concern is my Dad who is 82 and has been in and out of the hospital several times

in the last two years and hasn't had covid yet.

My brother passionately believes that covid is now typically

only a mild common cold (this has been a theme of a few weeks now).

I was pushing back, I've just had covid two weeks ago now and it was nasty,

but yes for myself it pretty mild i.e. a million miles from being hospitalized.

Still, I was quite sick/weak for a few days and while I thought I have fully recovered

a week ago, I have had some fatigue and headaches this week.

My brother annoyed me today, by his aggressive assertion that

omicron is typically only a mild cold, which many people hardly notice,.

When I complained that I have been pretty ill and so have several of

my friends in recent weeks with covid, he also started mocking me, along the lines of "I know David thinks he nearly died of covid". 

Today I held my ground asking where is the evidence that "omicron is typically no worse

than a mild cold", there might be some truth in this? I was hoping for some sort of report/link/evidence… and my brother

got rather the hump and left the family call… my parents then blamed me for being

too hard (was I being insufferable or are my parents just hoping for a quiet life?). 

Well I do see the queen is now sick and the briefing from Buckingham Palace is that :

“Her Majesty is experiencing mild cold-like symptoms but expects to  

continue light duties at Windsor over the coming week."  

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/feb/20/queen-tests-positive-for-covid

and 🤞 she makes a speedy recovery, although I'm a bit sceptical about Buckingham Palace briefings?

The Queen undoubtedly has the best health care that money can buy, but I believe she has only

just tested positive so predicting recovery times seems a bit premature?

Don't spit on Spinoza.

Amsterdam is a famously liberal and diverse city, not just in the 21st century but going back centuries and centuries. 

Amsterdam's rich cultural history and it's reputation for toleration has also built up over the centuries, for example, Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) was pushing the boundaries of the Amsterdam Jewish community in the mid 17th century with his then-radical ideas that God is everywhere and in everything:

 “Most religions teach that God exists somewhere outside the world, perhaps in heaven. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) was unusual in thinking that God is the world. He wrote about ‘God or Nature’, to make this point–meaning that the two words refer to the same thing. God and nature are two ways of describing a single thing. God is nature and nature is God. This is a form of pantheism–the belief that God is everything.”
— A Little History of Philosophy (Little Histories) by Nigel Warburton

I find this thinking beautiful and clearly resonates with many modern thinkers, but is possibly antithetical to religious extremists who believe this sort of thinking is dangerous?

There are boundaries to freedom and even Amsterdam struggles with some more extremists movement, who don't believe in equality for women or still see being in a same-sex relationship as a perversion. There appears to be a correlation between such religious zealots and a dislike of more liberal-thinker like Spinoza.

Before my Dutch wedding, we met outside the Amsterdam Gementee by the statue of Spinoza who is rapidly becoming one of my favourite philosophers. Not just an advocate of seeing God in Nature, but also geometry and mathematics: 

“Spinoza did not just admire geometry; he wrote philosophy as if it were geometry. The ‘proofs’ in his book Ethics look like geometrical proofs and include axioms and definitions. They are supposed to have the same relentless logic as geometry. But instead of dealing with topics like the angles of triangles and the circumferences of circles, they are about God, nature, freedom and emotion.”
— A Little History of Philosophy (Little Histories) by Nigel Warburton

The Leopold Bloom, the hero of Joyce's Ulysses, an Irish man from Hungarian-Jewish family background, is also a fan of Spinoza who is mentioned a couple of times, including this famously comic scene, were Bloom gets attacked by a bigotted fool with a biscuit box:

“—Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.—He had no father, says Martin. That’ll do now. Drive ahead.—Whose God? says the citizen.—Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me. Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.—By Jesus, says he, I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I’ll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuit box here.”
— Ulysses by James Joyce

and checking, I see this Ulysses-Spinoza on Wikipedia:

1922: Leopold Bloom is shown several times to be an admirer of Spinoza in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). Thoughts from Spinoza, an anthology, is represented on Bloom's bookshelf towards the end of the novel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza   

So I'm in good company with Leopold Bloom and Joyce! Well we live in remarkably broad and diverse society, none of us is divine, we all have our strengths and weakness, and I always try to be open to new ways of thinking plus putting myself into the perspective of others. But there are limits to toleration and I really struggle with those who want to spit on Spinoza?

NB Spinoza lived where the Moses and Aaron Church is located now, and there is strong evidence that he may have been born there:

By Amsterdam Municipal Department for the Preservation and Restoration of Historic Buildings and Sites (bMA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza#/media/File:Mozes_en_A%C3%A4ronkerk.jpg