Fame Doesn't Automatically Equal Fame

Yes, I'm an author, I want to be famous enough to make a living of my work. So, I want a kind of and a degree of fame.

That's not the same thing as pretending I am a "man who wants fame" generically, as if all fame were the same type.

I tried singing in the street and lost my voice after two years. I don't want fame as a performing musician.

I do not try to get into film acting or theatre acting. Never trained for acting back when acting talents my age were formed. I acted shepherd in a Christmas play, that's basically it, and it was one single performance.

What I did train from early on is writing. Both story writing (usually my novels got stuck in the first chapter, getting half way through my fan fic about Susan Pevensie is an upgrade ... in productivity, not necessarily sufficient creativity to make scenes work). And. Essay writing. Once in high school, twice at university, I took offense at having my essays graded too low, on my view. That was my ambition then, and remains it now.

I just saw a thing about someone who worked his way up, starting in Baywatch, when he was the age his son is now, and the son is in Dune 3, he was in Dune 1. The thing is, when acting a role, you either are supposed to work yourself up in your skills as an actor, or, child actors or other actors in youth, get very drilled for that role. Obviously, either way, you are at the receiving end of a learning process other people in the industry are watching, before you reach success. I have no stake if the casting of the Dune character was nepotism (as a video suggested) or his youth (and therefore inexperience) was a plot necessity for the role. I have no stake in whether the training he got with the turning crew made up for his inexperience or not. I don't think highly of Dune, not just because Tolkien was not a fan (that contributes), but because part of the setup is pretty disgusting to me, due to its bias in real world religious history.

But I definitely get it, if I wanted fame as an actor, in part I should have started way earlier than now, and definitely, I'd need a great deal of mentoring. I don't think it works if some lead roles do method acting and other lead roles do the kind of acting people did in Medieval Mystery plays or do in Oberammergau. Good point, btw. Mel Gibson couldn't have taken a Jesus from Oberammergau for the Jesus of The Passion of the Christ. (Just found out he shares the birthday with Tolkien, yesterday turned 70 — both of us were born before The Professor died). In each type of acting, any lead role has to learn the conventions for how much it's enough to gesture and how much you need to believe in the action. That takes time and it takes instruction. Probably less instruction for Oberammergau than for The Passion of the Christ. But still, it takes instruction. Even as a shepherd, I needed to be told what to do.

Now, essay writing is not a collaborative effort. It's a solitary one. Each essay writer sets his own conventions. Those of C. S. Lewis do not quite match those of G. K. Chesterton nor those of J. R. R. Tolkien (yes, he wrote some essays, three of them were the first volume of his works ever bought for me, because the cover of On Beowulf looked exciting*). They are also different from essay style passages in chapters by Karl May in his adventure stories**. Or from Frans G. Bengtsson. Or from the comic version of Swedish essay writing, Kar de Mumma, Ehrenmark, whose essays often are autobiographical short stories with lots of comic relief at the expense of the author.

In other words, I started out getting so to speak mentored by these writers by copying their turns (much more of the first three than the last two). It ended up becoming my style while I rose to debate challenges on the internet. Yes, the dialogue over the internet is an essay type which they usually didn't practise, and which I practise in a juridical grey zone. I haven't been sued by people whose words I exposed next to mine, theoretically it could happen, I keep my defense ready. If they claim "plagiarism" I say I left out most of their contributions to this or that forum, and they are each out of most of my dialogue essays, so fair use. I also recommend any editor to check with them first before publishing commercially on paper. It would be highly abusive on their part to extend that to the rest of my production, in essay format proper. If they claim privacy, I answer, no, the forum was a public space, like a club is so. If something is said or written before 100's of witnesses, it's not private. If they were OK with being seen by loads on the forum or in youtube comments, they should be OK with me making it further accessible.

I obviously am no fan of the concept of private clubs or masonic lodges. I very certainly am not an applicant for membership in them.

The strictly Academic format is not (mainly) for me, since those two essays at university that got a zero (one of them was part of a failed exam, the other, I made a reworked essay, more to the professor's satisfaction, less to mine: I don't like being told I can't show I'm upset if Erasmus*** considers "vouvoyer" as a "ridiculous superstition"). I don't claim I won't ever write anything more for a university, or that I'd be positively wounded if a university wanted to publish sth by me, but I simply observe, that's not the criterium I'm trying to live up to. It's not as if essay writing in humanities were totally value free, at their faculties, it's more of some kind of gliding scale and quod licet Iovi non licet bovi.° Well, some of my turns (including getting upset at an opponent's bad manners) certainly licuit bovi Siciliae.°°

The point is, my ambition has a specific shape, and dealing with it should not be calqued of concepts applicable to very different kinds of ambition. If the conventions in my essays don't match the editorial line of already existing publishing houses (books or periodics), I'm very fine with inspiring an upstart to cater explicitly, but not necessarily exclusively, to my style and interests. That's not narcissism (or if it is, I don't care for a concept so used). That's not naiveté. It's a realistic call of "don't ruin what I'm doing, by pretending I'm doing something else." I am less sure it's realistic to expect justice from such people in this life. To some, pretending I still need to be mentored is a welcome excuse for censorship under the pretext of protecting an inexperienced writer (if not worse).

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
II L.D. after Christmas
4.I.2026

PS. Pastiche is maybe frowned on by art critics. It is not plagiarism in the juridical sense. Ravels both most played pieces, 1) Bolero and 2) Pavane pour une infante défunte, are pastiche, on Spanish folk music and on Baroque music. It need not depend on sampling or quotations. My Viennese Classical music typically doesn't. And if you want to study a clumsy pastiche of the style of CSL from my pen, I suggest you go to the essays I wrote in High School°°°, not to the essays you find on my blogs./HGL

* The Swedish edition I talk of included The Monsters and the Critics, On Translating Beowulf, English and Welsh. Or was it actually an English edition? I don't recall for certain. ** Winnetou I begins with two chapters heavily laden with essays. Das Greenhorn describes the concept of a greenhorn. Der Feldmesser describes the task of a surveyor and the situation of railway surveyors getting into Apache territory before arriving at Scharlie actually being there. *** Opus de conscribendis epistolis has a chapter on the proper adressing of recipients. ° What Zeus is allowed to do, a simple bull is not allowed to do. A Roman pagan could say Zeus was allowed to take the shape of an bull and carry off Europa, because he was a god, but a bull in my herd should leave that kind of thing alone. Transferred: what you are allowed to do depends on your place in a hierarchy. °° The Ox of Sicily was allowed to. He did not show respect to people who had disrespected the Holy See, let alone the Holy Bible, for instance. Erasmus did get rude about papal titulature. One point about "holy father" being that the Papal title MUST NOT (in Latin) verbally match what Jesus called God the Father. And Erasmus thought that ridiculous, without going into the theological implication. °°° If you can find them. And if even there.