Freedom of Speech

“It was time for us to not see each other for a while; we really needed a break."
The young woman across the aisle was clutching her cell phone, staring out of the train window as she conversed. The car was fairly quiet and all passengers could follow her side of the conversation.

“We needed to take some distance.” That sounds like private information to me, and, if possible, I would want to avoid sharing such personal details with strangers. This is an old saw-horse for non-natives in the Netherlands: we converse more readily than the natives with strangers in public spaces, but we prefer to keep details of our private lives out of those public encounters.

Having said that, there is visible evolution underway; conversational boundaries appear less daunting. Whether or not this is happening independently of the ever-increasing vociferousness of the xenophobic right-wing (on occasion this can trigger responses such as “if you don’t like that in NL, just look at your own country” or “you can leave if you don’t like it” – before things get that far, I try to say: most countries seem to have one. Both countries which continue to supply me with passports certainly do), I can’t say.

More good news: xenophobes from England travelled to Amsterdam this weekend to join their Dutch comrades in an anti-foreigner demonstration, which basically fizzled out due to poor attendance. The righties were indignant about being forced to hold their rally far from the city center. Police kept the xeno’s and rival groups at a safe distance from one another, and I believe the Brits even got a free ride back to the airport in police vans. With so much hostile debate - on the streets and in parliament, for that matter – one doesn’t necessarily want to spend a train trip as witness to the hashing out of a private relationship, no matter how skilled the speaker may be. By the end of the young woman’s conversation with her estranged (business?) partner, she was chuckling and suggesting time and place for coffee.

For those wanting to avoid uninvited input of this nature, the Dutch railway system offers an alternative: many trains include a ‘Silence Car,’ a compartment where conversation, use of telephones and over-modulation of audio devices are discouraged. I respect the zone – not even my emery board comes into view. ‘Silence’ (and the Dutch equivalent ‘Stilte’) appears on the windows for those seated inside. The phone and conversation ban is also introduced with small visual aids on the walls. The challenge can be to identify the car before boarding, by catching a glimpse of the sign as your train speeds up to the platform before screeching to a halt. I scan the cars with some anxiety as they pass; my successes in entering Silence Cars have been purely coincidental.

Several recent occasions come to mind, all of them on trains passing through Amsterdam on their way to Schiphol Airport. Natives who have unwittingly taken seats in the quiet zone can generally be cajoled into a reflective state or at least into reducing their conversation to a whisper. Some collapse in giggles when asked by fellow passengers to respect the rules; others demonstrate belligerence – all of which contributes to even more noise.

A good number of the passengers are foreign visitors on their way to catch a flight home at the end of a busy working day or week. Once on the train, they are experiencing their first moments of leisure, remembering local hosts fondly. They make phone calls to offer thanks and to finalize agreements; they ask people to look out for a vest or scarf carelessly left behind. A Swedish businessman had evidently been working hard: he was slap-happy with laughter as he bid his hosts farewell. A Greek salesman ran a last inventory check, commenting on items held up from the open briefcase on his lap. A man speaking a minority language from the Surinamese interior was harangued into silence by a businesswoman (with whom I shared a moment of significant, simultaneous eyebrow-raising) speaking Sranantongo, the unifying language of Suriname, along with Dutch, of course. A group of French-speaking women introduced great mirth and good cheer into the wordless zone with chatter and laughter (please consult video fragment below). A fellow passenger, again across the aisle, explained (breaking off her glare at the rather derelict figure, with a bandaged hand and unkempt hair, hunched sideways in the bench across from mine in utter oblivion as he emitted a loud, grating snore) - she explained in a delightfully heavy Amsterdam inner-city accent why this was okay:

“They’re foreigners, they don’t know the rules.” I was grateful for this unexpected encounter with a glimmer of tolerance in the zone where we were meant to have immunity from exposure to any and all contrasting views.

Good Call

Unbeknownst to me, there was a place named Badcall in the area I was headed for in northwest Scotland. I hadn’t been able to resist the cheap flight between Amsterdam and Aberdeen, where I rented a car, knocking off the outer left mirror when passing through the first stone-walled village in my path. I spent a few nights in Kinlochbervie (see marker ‘A’) in a Bed & Breakfast by the sea; the door to my bedroom was too warped to close.

I walked to the end of the road at Balchrick, where a Post Office appeared as a faded wooden shack. Inside, the Post Mistress was waiting in the dark behind a barred window at the counter. She, the counter and the bars pretty much filled up the shack and quite possibly held it together. She called me ‘Dearie’ and casually sold me stamps for an envelope of photographs I was sending to Colombia. The envelope was still in my bag in Balchrick because officials at the airport Post Office in Holland had refused to send the chunky personal parcel ‘for security reasons.’

From a hilltop phone booth on this coastline I called my mother in North America. Near the empty white beach of Oldshoremore I met the fierce gaze of an elderly shepherd as he held open a gate for me when our paths crossed on high pastureland bordering the sea. He pointed across the valley, where sheep in motion traced tidal patterns on the slopes as they ran, leaping ahead of a swift, supple dog, whose name, as I deduced from the ferocious commentary emanating from a white-haired man swinging a crook in the direction of the canine, was Angus.

One Small Victory in the Bailout Era

I have two months to study this brochure and determine whether or not I qualify for the $35,000,000 (thirty-five million dollars) class action settlement from Bank of America. As it stands, I think I have to send them a letter either way: I can include myself or exclude myself. I think. 35-mln, peanuts these days, especially for what will in all likelihood turn out to be a pretty big class, but the tiny trickle of funds into my account has produced a balance modest enough to encourage an accommodating attitude towards any additions which may arrive, so I'll reread the brochure. It arrived unrequested in the mail. I didn't ask for it.

Having skimmed through once or twice, it doesn't look good, in fact, because I don't have a Bank of America debit card, but like I said, there's time to comb the fine print. I do have other credit cards occasionally in use, and recently I had an interesting experience related to personal finance and customer relations.

A letter from the credit card (CC) company arrived informing me that unfortunate transactions had occurred involving their lists of CC numbers and illegitimate participants in global markets, who might be planning to incur costs on others' accounts. Mine. For this reason, I would be receiving a new CC from them and could cut up the old one.

I called them to ask for more information. Specifically, I thought it opportune to inquire about the way in which my CC number might have been targetted. Where had this occurred?

That's confidential. We are not going to tell you that, as it could lead you to avoid doing business with the enterprise in question in the future. The fraud was no fault of their own, and these businesses are our clients. They must be able to rely on confidentiality at all times!

Oh, even as a small CC-holder, I'm a client, too. Aren't I? Don't I have a right to know what's happening with my miniscule account, especially if something goes wrong? It's my card, after all.

It's not your card. WE own it.

Actually, your company earns quite a reasonable rate of interest on anything that transpires involving the card which bears my name. If you wish to keep me as a client, you might want to respond to my request for transparency in a more civilized tone. But you sound quite angry and upset, so I think I'll just thank you so much for your time and get off the phone now and send a letter to your office.

You DO that. The letter will arrive on my desk and I'll answer you with the EXACT same information.

I sustained this tranquil mode while composing a short letter which now included both my original message and my disappointment at having heard that CC-holders were viewed as second-class clients. I never did receive an answer on paper, but the letter evidently landed on someone else’s desk, because within a few days, the phone rang, and a different voice from the CC-company greeted me in the most cordial of tones.

It is most regrettable that you were left with the impression that certain clients are more valuable than others. We are really in a bind here. I hope you can understand.

I do understand. If I were investigating this subject, I guess I would somehow gain access to the information about potential dangers to CC-accounts. Now of course I am not conducting an investigation - even though I am experienced in the field of journalism; I could forward you some of my work if you'd like - but I must stand by the principle of having a right to know what goes wrong when it goes wrong out in world of retail and apparently I’m involved.

I don't think anyone mentioned retail.

Well, you mean it wasn't retail?

And so forth. This quite pleasant conversation continued with the utmost respect from and towards both parties. At a certain point, disclosure of both the geographical and retail locations became inevitable, as we agreed that principled action and accurate exchange of knowledge was the most fulfilling premise for all business relations. I truly believe that this second young man from the CC-company had a new professional experience on the phone that day, disclosing the information which his company was not supposed to provide. In doing so, we sealed a deal based on trust. I vowed that I would never report having found out the name and location of the store where my CC-details were fed into a crime ring.

Tom Hanks and Charlie Sheen: True Crime Pt.2

Pt.1 - please see September 27, 2008.

No pen and paper was at hand, so the young man suggested that I use my cell phone to write down the information he was about to share. We met by chance, two customers in overcoats standing in the True Crime section of a bookstore in Glasgow. I scanned all the shelves; he noticed, smiled and asked if he could help. Typical, I thought to myself, of local people extending themselves in a friendly way. I explained that I was looking for two books related to the notorious Glasgow Ice Cream Wars in the 1980’s. The name covers turf-wars in rougher neighbourhoods over routes followed by ice cream trucks, whose owners stood to rake in attractive profits from the sale of stolen cigarettes, candies and according to some sources, drugs. Whatever the products, violence shaped the culture, and the Wars peaked with the deaths of six members of one family, including a baby, in a house fire. People were convicted and jailed, their sentencing and imprisonment later declared a miscarriage of justice. Two books have appeared on this saga, but the books are hard to find.

Still smiling, the source tilted his head and minced no words: You probably won’t find them in shops, they’re, uh, not usually available. Try the internet. He spelled out the full titles and authors’ names and watched me tap the data into my phone. I told him that I had looked in branch libraries, where a librarian had confided that True Crime titles tend to go missing in Glasgow. Protecting these books from theft has become a matter of library policy. My search of their catalogue reported the titles as On Loan or In Transit, catalogue code for Missing or Stolen, facts revealed when the librarian smirked as she scrutinized her more detailed in-house screen: The books have been missing from all of those libraries for several years. We used to fill the shelves with empty boxes bearing the cover, just like they do with DVD’s and videotapes. My interest was piqued, and she quickly shut down her search.

The entry on my phone was complete. Why are you so interested in finding these books, if I may ask? I paused in surprise, but my hesitation was misunderstood: Never mind, you don’t have to explain. I had been wondering why he knew so much about it, and I was happy to reply: I’ve been struck by Glasgow’s combination of such a forthcoming and humorous population with its legacy of hard crime. I had been reminded of Colombians, whose graciousness, hospitality and good manners are unsurpassed, in a country suffering from decades of violent civil conflict which, according to the UN, generated the largest humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere just a few years ago. I didn’t say all of that, of course, but paused again, hoping he would show his cards. My book friend just beamed as he backed away: You’re rrrright. Kind of a contradiction. Oh well, must go, catch ya later.

An internet search soon afterwards did turn up second-hand copies of both books. Before purchasing, I wanted to see these tomes, and made my way to the main library where they were both stocked in the reference section. Correction: held in compound. As in libraries everywhere, certain books are produced for viewing under supervision only, and so I was guided past a turnstile to the special area where another librarian produced the titles, after acknowledging, with a twinkle in her eye, that our readers do tend to love to hold onto their True Crime titles.

My reading experience in Glasgow coincided with and was enhanced by the Crime Thriller Awards Season on television, a full seven weeks devoted to the work of crime writers. The series has featured profiles of the nominees, one of whom explained that English crime writing tends to be lighter and less bloody, while Scottish crime and thriller stories are darker and grimmer. Scotland’s crime series par excellence is Taggart, a program which branded the pronunciation of the word murder. The series does well abroad, and in the French version, the lead Detective has been given a Marseille accent. No other regional sound would convey the toughness required by the job. My reading experience has also been deepened by the airing of a TV special celebrating 25 years of Taggart. Its enduring popularity, say the makers, is due to both its ingenious stories and gruesome deaths. Actors are admired, but the city of Glasgow itself is one of the main characters – not its contemporary cosmopolitan side, but the traditional grit and humor.

The Taggart special was Sponsored by the Barra’s – Scotland’s local market. When I visited this street market maze, I was told by a local woman that it was still nice five years ago, but that now drug-related crime was making her nervous. I rode a city bus far into Glasgow’s East End, where many of the most difficult neighborhoods lie. Massive urban regeneration efforts are underway across the zone in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2014, but there’s a lot of terrain to cover. When I reached the last area shown on the generous map in my hands, I got off at a local shopping center, a tiny, economically-challenged precursor to other giant malls closer to town. Community facilities are hard to find out here. When gang violence took over in the 1970’s, outsiders arrived to stage a production of Romeo and Juliet. Professionals filled the main roles, and kids brought in off the streets as extras understood the spirit of the play, with little explanation required.

An elderly woman was seated on a low brick wall outside the back entrance, with a view of the dingy apartment buildings dotting the hills beyond like forgotten bales of hay. Have a seat, Dearie, plenty of room here. She clutched shopping bags and smoked a cigarette, before I take a taxi back home, she volunteered. I live in a village nearby. This place is going to close down soon, there’s too many shops closing because of the recession. You having a nice visit here, are you? That’s lovely. Yes, Tom Hanks and Charlie Sheen like Glasgow, too – well, they didn’t come out here, they were in hotels in the center, but I heard they liked it.

I’m not sure what brought Tom Hanks to Glasgow, but about 10 years ago Charlie Sheen played an alcoholic detective from the USA chasing a serial murderer in Scotland. The good and the bad have broad appeal. Even Barack Obama pays homage, as we found out thanks to Katie Couric from CBS, who asked the presidential candidates to name their favourite movies.

Obama: My favorite has to be the opening scene of the first Godfather – where the caretaker comes in and Marlon Brando is sitting there and he is saying ‘you disrespected me, and now you want a favour’ …the combination of old world gentility and ritual with this savagery underneath it, and it’s all about families, it’s a great movie.

An Extremely Brief Technical Reference

From left to right:

Who wants to answer a call when the number is withheld?

For the duration of a 23-minute skype call with a far-off friend, Skype tried to lure me to their online store by saying that the audio wasn't working.

Another Martha Hawley on IMDb has stolen my only film role and I want it back, but so far no luck.

(for a 'Very Brief Technical Reference,' see August 4, 2007)

Rising sea levels in literature

Time to release my files, to offer transparency on documentation I’ve held onto, some of it for a very long time. First up: the “Roses are red…”quips written by a childhood friend on the back of a card which reads “Learn to complain without suffering.” This appealing take-off on the self-help industry was ahead of its time. As young girls we were amused by the messages on both sides of the cardboard. As an adult, I acknowledge that some cardboard should stay, but some should go.

Papers from my archive that can and should be recycled include blow by blow accounts of family feuds; detailed daily logs from offices, church organizations and sports clubs; Christmas newsletters containing hyperbolic reports of the achievements of one family; Certain love letters; Copies of third-time reminders of subscription cancellations; Photocopies of an article from a South Florida newspaper describing ´Floribbean´ cuisine from the ´mango gang.´ After all:
There are only four years to go before celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Julio Cortázar’s Cronopios and Famas (Historias de Cronopios y de Famas), a work addressing a number of socio-cultural concerns as relevant today as they were in 1962. Nonsense, you say, this literature of the absurd pokes fun at human foibles, but nothing is intended for serious reading. The author himself said he wrote the book for fun, but for many readers, this kind of fun can only be appreciated by those who have experienced not-fun or extreme discomfort. Cortazar’s commitment to the written word was experimental, intimate and irreverent. The texts in Cronopios and Famas are short, a length familiar to those who hoard undesignated jottings from train rides, notes from a seminar or thoughts that pile up during a telephone conversation and have nowhere else to go.

"As the scribes will persist, the few readers there are in the world are going to have to change their roles and become scribes themselves. More and more countries will be made up of scribes, and more and more factories will be necessary to manufacture paper and ink, the scribes by day and the machines by night to print the scribes’ work. First the libraries will overflow the houses, then the municipalities decide (now we´re really into it) to sacrifice their children´s playgrounds to enlarge the libraries. Then the theaters will go, then the maternity homes, slaughterhouses, bars, hospitals. The poor use the books like bricks, they stick them together with cement and build walls of books and live in cabins of books. Then it happens that the books clear the cities and invade the countryside, they go on flattening wheatfield and meadows of sunflowers, even though the Department of Highways manages to keep the roads cleared, even if only between two extremely high walls of books. At times a wall gives and there are terrifying automobile accidents. The scribes labor without let because humanity respects vocations, and the printed matter reaches the seashore. The President of the Republic gets on the telephone with the presidents of the republics, and intelligently proposes to cast the leftover books into the sea, which act is accomplished simultaneously on every coast in the world. Thus the Siberian scribes see their works cast into a sea of ice and the Indonesian scribes etc. This allows the scribes to step up their production as the earth again has space to store their books. It does not occur to them that the sea has a bottom and that at the bottom of the sea the printed matter is beginning to pile up, first in the form of a sticky pulp, then in the form of a solid pulp, and finally a tough though viscous flooring which rises several feet a day and will finally reach the surface. Then much of the water invades many of the lands and there is a new distribution of continents and oceans, and presidents of various republics are replaced by lakes and peninsulas, presidents of other republics see immense territories newly open to their ambitions, etc. Sea water, forced to expand with such unprecedented violence, evaporates faster than ever, or seeks rest. Blending itself with the printed matter to make that glutinous pulp, to the point that one day ships´ captains on the great trade routes report that their ships are advancing slowly, thirty knots drops to twenty, to fifteen, the engines sputter and pant and the propellers are wrenched and bent out of shape. Finally the ships stop wherever they are at different places in the sea, trapped by the pulp, and scribes all over the world write thousands of articles and books explaining the phenomenon and are filled with an enormous happiness. The presidents and the captains decide to convert the ships into islands and gambling casinos, the public arrives on foot upon the cardboard seas, and on these islands and casinos dance orchestras fill the night and sweeten the air-conditioned atmosphere and the dancing lasts until the early hours of the morning.. New printed material is piling up on the seashores, but it´s impossible to put it into the pulp, so that walls of printed matter are growing and mountains are being born on the shores of the old seas. The scribes realize that the ink and paper companies are going to go bankrupt, and their handwriting gets smaller and smaller and they use the most imperceptible corners of each sheet of paper. When the ink runs out they write in pencil, etc. When the paper goes, they write on slabs of wood or rock or on stone tiles, etc. The practice of intercalating one text into another begins to become popular, to take advantage of the space between the lines, or to scrape down the letters already printed with razor blades so as to use the paper again. The scribes are working slowly now, but their numbers are so immense that printed matter now separates the land completely from the bed of the ancient seas. On the earth the race of scribes lives precariously, doomed to extinction, and at sea there are the islands and casinos, or rather the ex-transatlantic liners, where the presidents of the republics have fled to refuge and where they hold enormous parties and exchange wireless messages from island to island, president to president, and captain to captain… (´End of the World of the End´, from Cronopios and Famas by Julio Cortázar, 1962.)

Thanks for Calling

Several years ago, I found part of Steve Walker’s boarding card in a hotel room.

I had been surprised to find the stub on the floor of the large closet when I pushed open the folding doors. The room appeared to be spotless, with only this fairly substantial paper scrap on the floor. It seemed to me - in this new era of heightened security - to be a significant discovery. Steve, the passenger, had evidently stayed in this same room a few days earlier, and the stub confirmed that he had flown into town. I say 'confirmed' because of the hand-written number covering the printed data, indicating the positioning of ground crew at a point where they observed progression of passengers into the actual body of the plane, as the only physical alternative to either remaining in the Gate area or vanishing back into the airport with a boarding pass, intact or otherwise. Passengers with hand-written numbers on their stubs were presumed to have boarded the flight and disembarked at the destination.
The most likely conclusion to be drawn after finding the stub on the closet floor was that he had stayed in this room. The chances of someone else having acquired his boarding stub were slim. Printed data included his name, date, origin and destination, so I found a telephone number for a person of his name in the location of 'origin' and I called him. I didn't call him to have him either confirm or deny having stayed in the hotel; I called him to ask whether he objected to me posting the image of a boarding stub with his name on it. He could have suspected a scam or a call center and slammed the phone down, or he might have wanted to keep me on the line long enough for a trace. I had no way of knowing.

Instead, he listened to my introduction and said yes, he had a moment for a conversation, and no, that wasn't him in the hotel room, and he had no objection to the transfer of printed data which didn't actually refer to him. Steve was relaxed, uninterested in internet activities. He laughed, and bid me farewell with the words ‘take care.’

He was very friendly, and I could imagine him using the stub as a bookmark, perhaps leaving the paperback on his seat by mistake, or giving it to the person seated next to him, who then checked into the hotel and left the stub behind in the closet.