Flashback: 'I got a lot of wind from the front'
Writer Michaël Zeeman was the favorite teacher of pop journalist and football writer Menno Pot. Zeeman took him hard at the University of Amsterdam. "Finally something happened."
Picture: Fred van Diem
“I absolutely wanted to study in Amsterdam and I tuned my studies accordingly. I chose Cultural Studies, a hodgepodge of all kinds of studies. I didn't like it at all, a mess, with a lot of overlap between the subjects. I waited for the writing practical courses in the last few years, that's what I did it for, but when they finally came, they turned out so bad and so non-committal that I was about to quit. And just then we received a course from Michaël Zeeman. Then it got fun, and hard. He had us write one assignment, and immediately after that he sent a few people away: "You can leave, it's just not there."
In a brutal way he put the knife in my first pieces. More red stripe than good text. If you wrote elaborately or emotionally, he would add "RIAGG" in the margin, which meant "what a floaty chatter." Not everyone could stand his harsh feedback, which thinned out the group further. But I took a kind of masochistic pleasure in it. He said to me, "It's really bad, but I see you can, and I'm going to teach you." Then he took me under his wing. He became my internship supervisor and later also thesis supervisor, he normally did not do that, he thought that kind of thing was nonsense. Every now and then he called and said, "I'm sure you haven't done anything for two weeks." Then I said, "That's right."
'In an hour on the Nicolaas Witsenkade', he would say sternly, because that's where he lived. For fifteen minutes I got the wind from the front. He pushed me through my senior year with love but sometimes also roughly. Only afterwards did I realize that he took care of me. He saw that I could take a beating and he saw writing pleasure. Or he suddenly said, "We're going out for dinner." Then I had to report somewhere. From seven to eight, and then he was gone again. Then he went to the next appointment. He had the evening full of appointments like this.
When he died, contact between us was watered down, but I was sad. Without him I would not have finished my studies. He also turned me on as a pop journalist at the Volkskrant to apply where he had been chief of art for a while. 'You like that nonsense, that pop music, don't you? Then you have to call now, someone is leaving. ' He had nothing to do with pop music, but he was fond of people who could write a good piece about it. Sometimes while writing I still hear his voice: "RIAGG."
Maarten Doorman, lecturer in cultural philosophy at Maastricht University and a good friend of Michael Zeeman (1958-2009): “Michaël Zeeman was erudite, enthusiastic, unconventional, sometimes hard as nails but also generous. We see these qualities reflected in Menno Pot's account. Zeeman had nothing to do with pop music. That he nonetheless supported Menno Pot in this way says a lot about that generosity. In the teacher described by Pot, we also see the writer Zeeman: critical, with an open mind and a broad view. A voice that we sorely miss in contemporary cultural criticism. ”
