Witness - BBC

I have taken up listening to a daily BBC podcast: Witness (feed). Every workday it delivers a short (9 minutes) program about a historic event that occurred around the same date. The event is briefly recounted and the elaboration is done by letting a witness talk about it. Hence the title.

Almost invariably the result is very impressive. The whole atmosphere of the episode is also greatly determined by the kind of event that is told. The issue about Hiroshima as a consequence is very austere and stylized, the issue about the Battle of Britain very narrative and so on. The partition of India was deemed to large to tackle in one program and last week saw one part and this week a second is expected. Part one was very impressive - a great recommendation.

Also recommended is the issue about the Kursk disaster. Obviously, no sailors from aboard the submarine could be interviewed, as there were no survivors. However, one of the British members of the rescue mission spoke and brought home the experience of the poor men trapped in the sunken ship as he had survived a similar fate several years previously.

Michiel van Erp - Marathon Interview

Het Marathon Interview heeft in de feed eerst drie oude uitgaves die alle drie zeer de moeite waard zijn (Drion, Hiltermann en Karel van het Reve), maar heeft ook het een en ander te bieden aan recent materiaal. Zo schreef ik eergisteren over Ger van Elk en nu dan over het interview dat Lotje IJzermans op 8 juli had met Michiel van Erp. (feed)

Van Erp is een documentairemaker en hoewel ik zijn werk gemist heb, had ik al wel van een aantal van zijn films gehoord. In het eerste uur kunnen we een beetje kennis met hem maken en ruiken aan de algemene problematiek van de documentaire - vooral het punt van de manipulatie van de werkelijkheid komt herhaaldelijk naar voren en blijkt niet helemaal bevattelijk voor hem te zijn. Daarna zijn er twee documentaires die iets specifieker besproken worden en die een fascinerende inkijk in Van Erps werkwijze en denkwijze geven.

Naar aanleiding van zijn werk over de koningin komt hij met een verrassende analyse van haar persoon. De konigin als laatste persoon die nog in het sprookje van het koningsschap gelooft. Dat is echt iets om te horen (in het tweede uur), maar als je denkt dat je dan het hoogtepunt gehad hebt, komt de documentaire over mensen met angsten aan de orde en wordt het nog veel interessanter.

Meer Het Marathon Interview:
Ger van Elk,
Ileana Melita,
VPRO's Marathon Interview,
Hans Galjaard,
Bert ter Schegget.

Stasi agents and informants - NBIH

The podcast New Books in History is a great program to subscribe to by all means, but in case you are interested in content about the Cold War, the end of it and the rise and fall of the Soviet world. In this realm there is a great wealth of issues to be had. One of which came out just in this past weeks. (feed)

In this program Marshal Poe interviewed Gary Bruce about the inside story of the Stasi, the secret police of communist Germany (DDR). Did the DDR need a secret police? Poe and Bryce emphasize how paranoid the communist regimes were and how they expected traitors and saboteurs always and everywhere. Hence the extended network of agents and the even more extended network of informants. In the end I wonder how exaggerated it is the state that one half of the DDR citizens was spying on the other half.

Bruce's research as you get to know it from the interview, although it does reveal the pumped up paranoia of the soviet system, does teach rather something else. It shows how the Stasi was organized. Where did the agents come from, how were they trained and employed. And once there were agents, there was the recruiting and management of informants. Bruce's story about his research also reveals what happened to the Stasi and its files once the DDR fell apart and with it its secret police. This all went so swift, the Stasi disintegrated before it could destroy its archives. And this allows many historians such as Bruce to study the Stasi and by extension the reality of a surveillance state.

More NBIH:
War in Human Civilization,
Always recommended: New Books in History,
The best varied history podcast,
The Caucasus,
The genocide and the trial.

Ger van Elk - Marathon Interview

Het Marathon Interview van de VPRO is niet alleen op de radio te beluisteren in de zomer, ook de podcast heeft juist in de zomer nieuwe input gekregen. Naast oude interviews uit het rijke verleden, nieuwe interviews die zojuist op radio 6 te beluisteren zijn geweest. (feed)

Een van die recente interviews vond plaats op 7 Juli. Anton de Goede ging in gesprek met beeldend kunstenaar Ger van Elk. Voor het eerst begreep ik wat precies conceptuele kunst is. Ik ben voldoende snob om te proberen wat kunst heet als zodanig te begrijpen, maar kan het evenmin laten om mijn schouders op te halen bij produkten zoals die van Van Elk. Een opgewreven vloer? Een blokje hout dat wit is geverfd (weliswaar op een schip in de IJszee)? Dan krijg ook ik het gevoel dat de kunstenaar zich er met een Jantje van Leiden van af maakt en wegkomt door een handig excuus uit de duim te zuigen.

In het interview probeert Van Elk op geen enkel moment om je te overtuigen van zijn verhaal. Evenmin probeert hij te behagen. Hij spreekt gewoon, hij toont zijn manier van denken en kijken en voor je het weet ga je erin mee. Ik vond het een fascinerende reis, mee te kijken met de onconventionele blik van Van Elk, mee te denken met de visie van Van Elk en zodoende de interne logica te ontdekken. En dat is dan conceptuele beeldende kunst: het idee van de kunstenaar uitgewerkt in een visueel produkt. Vervolgens is het dan ook iets makkelijker om de omgekeerde weg te bewandelen en afgaande op het kunstvoorwerp en het idee te ontdekken.

Meer Het Marathon Interview:
Ileana Melita,
VPRO's Marathon Interview,
Hans Galjaard,
Bert ter Schegget,
Lea Dasberg.

Alan Rabinowitz at Speaking of Faith

At APM's Speaking of Faith, three weeks ago, Krista Tippett spoke with Alan Rabinowitz who is a zoologist and wildlife conservationist. The title for the program was: A Voice for the Animals. As such, you would expect a conversation about animal rights and what animals and the biosphere  mean for the world. That would be interesting in itself, but the issue to a whole other turn. (feed)

Tippett's conversation with Rabinowitz, concentrated much more on him as a person and the individual challenges he has to overcome in order to achieve what he has been achieving in life. For example, there is his stutter and although having a stutter, certainly as serious as he had it, is quite the handicap, Rabinowitz's life story shows how a challenge can turn into a quality. Having a stutter shut him out socially, but allowed him to bond with animals and develop the skills he needed for his profession. And then, his profession and his bothersome relationship with speech and the social constraints of life, allowed him his insights.

But that is not all, there is also his amazing encounter with the Asian pygmy and by the end of the show, his candid discussion of what it means to have cancer. And in the mean time, he has also touched on the meaning of having children. And so, this show goes beyond the subject of animal rights and if Rabinowitz supplies a voice for the animals, human beings are part of that palette he speaks for - the man with the stutter.


More Speaking of Faith:
Desmond Tutu,
China, secularism, religiosity,
Three issues of Speaking of Faith,
Preserving Ojibwe,
The story and God.

SciFi and realism - Making history with Ran Levi

Making History with Ran Levi (עושים היסטוריה! עם רן לוי) takes, every once in a while, an excursion into the world of SciFi literature. Usually to discuss the life and work of one writer of SciFi or another, but this time a subject slightly differently. (feed)

SciFi, obviously, needs to be a work of fiction which relies on science and some kind of imaginative extrapolation where science could bring us. Needless to say, both the extrapolation as well as the fiction stretch the science quite a bit, but to a certain extent, the science still must be accurate. Ran Levi kicks off with an example, the TV series Space 1999, which has the moon get marooned in space and he tells how none other than Isaac Asimov took exception with the scientific inaccuracy in the story. It shows that bad science can wreck an otherwise good piece of fiction.

Another example is that of Larry Niven's Ringworld, which seemed to me very sound as I read it, but which has a serious flaw as Levi explains on the show. In the rest of the series Niven went to great lengths repairing his scientific inaccuracies. But as Levi also shows, if the SciFi writer will do everything to make his science OK, his fiction might falter. And that is the conclusion of this entertaining show: the science needs to be accurate, but to certain extent imagination should be allowed to stretch it, even beyond accuracy, for the sake of the story. It seems like an impossible hole.

More Making History with Ran Levi:
The history of Anesthetics,
Social Engineering for hackers,
Ran Levi, then, now and about the Long Now,
Of nightmares and sleepwalking,
Mass Extinctions.