An academic acquires a grant to write a book on the painter Titian in Berlin for the summer, while his wife and son vacation in Italy. Early on in his time in Berlin, he decides that television has become too distracting and he swears it off while he works on his book (If this doesn't sound like a pretentious plot, I don't know what does). This proves more difficult than he expected and instead of being distracted by television, our academic quickly finds other ways to procrastinate: swimming...more An academic acquires a grant to write a book on the painter Titian in Berlin for the summer, while his wife and son vacation in Italy. Early on in his time in Berlin, he decides that television has become too distracting and he swears it off while he works on his book (If this doesn't sound like a pretentious plot, I don't know what does). This proves more difficult than he expected and instead of being distracted by television, our academic quickly finds other ways to procrastinate: swimming, museum gazing, street wandering, single engine airplane flying, etc. And this seems to be the plight of the artist, because his work is never far from his mind:
"I felt a sudden twinge of regret at the thought of having to forgo my work for the day. Truth to tell, it was always this way: the less I thought myself obligated to work, and indeed the more certain the impossibility of working, the more desire to work I felt, and the more capable of working, as if, with the prospect of work receding into the distance, the task shed all its potential torments, simultaneously draping itself in all the many promises of future accomplishment."
And this:
"For the simple reason, it seemed to me, that if you've already extracted all the pleasure from the potential joys of a project before you've begun it, there remain, by the time you get down to it, only the miseries of the act of creation, its burden, its labors."
And that seems about right. The Idea of the thing always feels and looks much better than the Act of the thing...well, sometimes anyway. And of course, the most important thing is the Act, not the Idea, when it comes to writing that is.
This book was written originally in French, circa 1997. Toussaint's views on television are of a very specific kind of television:
"...twenty-four hours a day, it seems to flow along hand in hand with time itself, aping its passage in a crude parody where no moment lasts and everything soon disappears, to the point where you might sometimes wonder where all those images go once they've been broadcast, with no one watching them or remembering them or retaining them, scarely seen at all, only momentarily skimmed by the viewer's gaze. For where books, for instance, always offer a thousand times more than they are, television offers exactly what it is, its essential immediacy, its ever-evoling, always-in-progress superficiality."
Ok, sure, fine, television can be shockingly bad and requires nothing from us as viewers. But also, television can be really friggin good, at least in the past ten years it has shown it can. And again, this was written in 1997, when television in Belgium (Toussaint's place of origin) was probably really bad, just as it was also really bad here in the U S of A. I mean, come on, 1997, what was on? And I think it's unfair of Toussaint, or his character, to compare books with television. They are two different mediums. It doesn't really work. They offer different pleasures and require different things from their audience.
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