Fake Grass, Real Stickers

The newspaper from Texas arrived in Amsterdam with a visitor, who, like others before her, had kindly contacted me before leaving her home to ask if there was anything I wanted from the USA.

“A local newspaper, please.”

I like reading the most local of stories, of knowing that I’m supporting a local economy somewhere by encouraging the purchase of what I consider to be an important presence in each community. For the traveller, newspapers are not expensive. They are readily available and pose no packing problems.

The Texan delivered.

As the headline above reveals, the story that caught my eye concerned a resident of Dallas caught up in a legal battle over his front yard. His home stands in an urban zone of historical importance, and inhabitants have obligations: buildings and property must be maintained. The photograph of the man published with the article is slightly blurred, taken from a position higher than the subject. Motion, height: I imagined the photographer cruising past the man in a tall pick-up truck, vibrating in suspension over monstrous tires, the engine toned down to a percolating rumble as the subject was approached.

The pick-up passengers might have spoken with the man, although the article quotes a daughter, not the man himself, to explain his point of view. His English, it seems, was not very fluent. The picture might have been taken by a photographer drifting past in a helicopter, zooming in as the chopper sought balance in mid-air. As portrayed, the man does not seem to object to being photographed, but he does look sad. He had gone to great lengths to provide his home with a decent yard, but now, if I remember correctly, Dallas officials had ruled that the fake grass (widely used in the region, easily available) had to be removed, because it didn’t match the house on the lot.

I was also struck by the free color insert in this edition of the newspaper: stickers for readers’ appointment books. ‘Swimming pool services’ and ‘hunting season’ had two stickers each, while ‘family reunion’ had only one.

672 candidates

A new national government will be elected in the Netherlands on 9 June; election anxieties always mount for me when I receive my free copy of the candidates list (see above), which this year carries the names of 672 candidates.

I have addressed the subject in earlier posts: please see, for example "EU Election Anxieties" on 31 May 2009, when the 289 candidates put to the test my abilities to get informed and make a real choice.

We who will cast ballots are meant to vote for a party, not an individual, but we who will wield the red pencils in the voting booths can vote for any 1 of the 672 people running for parliament. A candidate lower down on the list can squeak past fellow party members higher up on the list if enough preferential votes come in. Ambitions to do just that take some candidate MP's out on the campaign trail, but the leaders of the respective parties have the highest profile, of course.

As in other European countries, the right-wing in Holland is coming along very nicely, thank you. We the people who would prefer to see center-left at least one step ahead hope that the good weather continues so that enough of the electorate will find a visit to a polling station (all local sites printed on the back of the candidates lists produced and distributed for each individual voting district) a pleasant proposition.

Some good things about disasters

I saved the receipt from the Glasgow green-grocer to remind me of Marta’s accent. She was a new resident of Scotland from Poland, working for Asians, and I imagined hearing all of that when she spoke. Throughout that neighborhood, commerce was being livened up by more new Britons (see LBN post Those Persians 25 March 2009). Eastern Europe used to be far away, but EU-member Poland in particular has been exuding a country-next-door come-hither aura.

This is not unfamiliar to me: Polish surnames (some Jewish, some not) were common at my grade school near New York City. Later on, Joe, the handy-man at my college dormitory, was Polish, and

He took care of his girls.

Under the circumstances this was a near-heroic stance: some of the local farmers in the New York countryside blamed crop failure on the young female students (offered as a postscript to recent remarks by an Iranian cleric who blamed natural disasters on scantily-clad, promiscuous women, statements which conjured up the images of Joe and Marta), girls who wore strange clothes and often spoke in loud tones, emphasizing their urban origins and accompanying disregard for country life. Joe was a Catholic family man, the son of pre-WWII immigrants. He turned up regularly with kielbas, as he called it.

Only the real Polish sausage for my girls.

Another encounter dates from the more recent past: one day I called my bank in Amsterdam to ask them to verify whether or not their internet banking system was experiencing an interruption of normal services. The customer service representative was very friendly and sounded sincerely apologetic about the breakdown. She spoke Dutch with an East European accent, and, yes, she confirmed, she was working out of a call center in Poland, one of Western Europe’s destinations for near-shoring (out-sourcing and paying lower wages) operations. This woman was delightful, in possession of a sweet voice and a willingness to depart from the call center script. She had been drafted from the population of new Dutch residents of Polish origin (and that story is not all peachy: see LBN post I Promise You 31 December 2008) to go home and earn a living there speaking Dutch. I hope she didn’t lose her job as a result of our conversation.

At Lurline's Behest

From the International Letters Home Archive emerges correspondence between Lurline Birchum and her mother. The fonts in this typeset version appear to have been selected with the aim of replicating the appearance of the original handwritten version. It is unclear whether the earlier handwritten version was notated by Lurline herself or put on paper by another literate townsperson at Lurline's behest. The glossary with pronounciation guide indicates that reception of the letter would have been dependent on accurate phonetic delivery of the contents. In all their brevity, the documents offer poignant insights into small-town life.

Let's be Civilized: Not allowed to show you (Pt.3)

Previously on Life Before News:

Not allowed to show you (Pt.1) – May 25, 2007

So far this much is known: Not allowed to show you (Pt.2) – June 5, 2007

From the rough graffiti displayed on January 30 to – by reassuring coincidence - an elegant anarchist cocoon: “Coming soon…” is the full text on the English-language webpage of the Library I entered on the day when the Dalai Lama and Barack Obama appeared together on front pages of newspapers everywhere. If you like that 19th-century polished wood sensation, this Library is a beautiful place, with a reading room seating 24, books locked behind well-cleaned glass, a conference room for public events and the Director’s office still sheltering a pianola (nostalgic and silent in our times; as innovative as the Library and its new collection back in the day), the only visual reminder of the space’s original purpose as a music room, where pianos and sheet music were at the disposal of any visitor who cared to drop in and play a few bars.

On a brief working trip to Barcelona, I had gone in search of a quiet place to read and write. In this city of monumental architecture, an ornate neighborhood retreat on a smaller scale would surely be just around the corner. It was: a library set in the former home of a 19th-century mustachioed left-wing anti-Catholic intellectual and anarchist, a playwright and Freemason, who instructed the trustees of his will to build what would become Barcelona’s first public library (although to this day run by a private foundation), open to all regardless of gender, age or social class and free of censorship on social, political or religious grounds. Any such symbols were banned (everywhere, including the Boardroom), as clearly spelled out in the Library’s very own rule book, a significant stipulation considering that the Library was opened in 1895, on the eve of the Montjuïc Trials, the torture of anarchists by the Spanish military and ensuing decades of bloodshed and violence - a history beyond the scope of this post, but one which is indeed still subject to review and revision as hidden documentation comes to light.

The Library staff agreed that I was free to write anything I want about what appears to be a pearl of an institution, but they issued clear instructions to the effect that - although I had followed proper procedures and obtained permission to take photographs inside through swift composition of a brief handwritten letter explaining my motivation, where I also made it clear that no commercial gain would result from using the photographs I envisioned taking of the abundance of text in view (not only on bookcovers, but inside the glass display cases [carrying paraphernalia from the world of Freemasonry which had survived previous eras of censorship under the dictator who missed the opportunity of destroying this subversive material when he ordered the Library closed rather than ransacked] and within the tiled floor under our feet and the tiled frescos overhead, the latter featuring the names of great scholars and writers in an inspired flow including a sequence which I particularly enjoyed: the moustachioed Edgar Allen Poe*, the tormented early 19th-century Boston-born writer, so popular in Europe, who laid the foundations of the modern thriller, the moustachioed and bearded Confucius*, the Chinese philosopher whose name now adorns the official Institutes of Chinese Culture which are mushrooming in hundreds of towns and universities around the world from Tehran to Texas, from Norway to New Zealand, funded by the Chinese government, a perfectly normal official cultural strategy made all the more interesting if one considers that flaunting Confucius was until relatively recently not done, and, next to him, another author whose work is recited thousands of years after its creation: the moustachioed and bearded [frankly they could all have lost the facial hair and that would have been fine by me] Valmiki*, India’s sage, poet of poets and author of the Sanskrit-language Ramayana epic almost 2500 years ago) – their instructions made it clear that I should not in any way, especially via internet, share pictures I might take, hence this quixotic ode to an urban retreat for all, a hub for scholars still reading through the collections behind glass, an ode which I conclude without identifying the research institution by name, out of what may in part be excessive deference to their desire to control the information and image flow and in part my own wish to enhance imagined scenarios where the dream-like hush of the dark wood, tile and marble interior of the Library is central, where the books have not yet been forwarded into the digital zone.

*The names of these illustrious men adorn the library interior, not their portraits.

Invigilation, Anarchy and Civilization

Laws and constitutions are subject to interpretation, that much we all understand by now. But when a Dutch lawyer confessed to me that nobody in Holland really knows exactly how many laws there are to begin with, because they’re all rumbling around in profusion on computer chips in The Hague, I wondered if this was an aspect which could at some point spawn unforeseen complications. Breaking the rules is a matter of pride in this country – so it would be nice to identify the limits - perhaps not nationwide, but certainly in Amsterdam, where violation of most recognized codes of behavior has become a code in its own right: hurtling along a crowded sidewalk on your bicycle, tossing a still-burning cigarette butt in the air. I’ve been confronted with challenges to the system, not only as a civilian on the street, but as the enforcer of exam roles, the protectress of the honest and the good. I have performed as the invigilator.

While presiding over distance-learners as their invigilator, I was often in one hall with dozens of individuals from various Dutch Provinces, Britain, Spain, Portugal, Nigeria, Cameroon, Thailand China, Pakistan, Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic. Most exam candidates were prompt, if not early, settled at their assigned desk in a state of concentration. Usually a small knot of desks in the middle would be empty until 5 minutes before the exam began. Suddenly the door would burst open and a noisy group of adult males – accountants doing the compulsory refresher course – would rush in to find their numbered seats, come to register at the front desk without the required papers, inquire whether it’s really necessary to sit at the numbered seats, smirk and roll their eyes at the reply, ask us to look up their seat numbers, slouch back to their seats, transfer plastic-sealed snacks and water bottles (allowed) from their bags (not allowed) to the desktop, etc. On one occasion, a young woman presented an expired (not allowed) passport as her photo ID, and returned triumphantly when the exam was over to show me the registration papers which stipulate that a photo ID is indeed required – but the word valid didn’t appear anywhere in the text.

Most of the candidates were impressive: young adults holding down full time jobs while they studied, preparing for promotions or for assignments overseas. The hours of quiet had great appeal, linked by a few sounds only: papers sliding on desks, the clicking of pens and soft tapping on calculators, the rare sniffle or sneeze.

Occasionally there was someone like the au-pair from New Zealand, sitting for ‘Chinese Literature and Society’. She finished early and as no other candidates were present that day, we talked. As a believer she had joined a Christian Church and had learned Dutch from reading the Bible. I told her about learning Dutch from reading newspapers when I first came to Amsterdam. When I started speaking the language, I sounded like a walking front-page article – full of a syntax which is effective in print, but less than convincing when applied in conversation. She told me yes, her Dutch did echo Scripture, but that she didn’t mind, and neither did most of her partners in conversation as they were members of the Congregation, too, where by the way she planned to linger for the foreseeable future. There was little to go back to, what with the Maori’s being coddled by the government and the foreigners getting all the breaks. I was sure she would fit in somewhere in NL, perhaps with the political party whose leader is now on trial for inciting hatred and discrimination. The nanny was uncertain about whether her visa would be extended and had decided to get a head-start on Chinese civilization in case she gets sent home – at least the Chinese are coming down and creating jobs, not just claiming them.

Distinctive Breeds

[please see video below text]

A departure board of the old, clattering kind: few lights, great sound – hanging in the Gare du Nord, the train station where passengers heading north bid Paris farewell. People arriving from the north must weave their way towards the street through the crowds, staring upwards at the display until their train’s track number spins into view or recording short videos until the jostling is too much to bear.

A daughter of train-commute culture, I participate in the rail dynamic in general and the Amsterdam-Paris transfer in particular with profound pleasure and some fluency – most of the time. Things got off to a bad start on one occasion, but good fortune was eventually restored, by a number of people, I should add.

The taxi which brought me to the Gare that day pulled up to the main entrance with some speed. I was on the late side and had imagined gathering my bags and setting out swiftly towards the train in an unbroken flow of motion, but this strategy involved backing out of the cab, effectively blocking from my view a small raised yellow barrier next to the taxi lane. The painted mound tripped me and I crashed bags and all, breaking the fall with my left arm.

I still wanted to catch that train, but as I shuffled off, a Porter rushed over and explained that MANY complaints had been filed about the treacherous yellow dividers. They were meant to protect pedestrians on the other side but ended up felling incoming taxi passengers. This eloquent young man of West African origin convinced me that I should at least go to the hospital next door and have my arm checked. He would escort me there after accompanying me to the ticket office to report the accident and secure passage on a later train.

I went along with the plan, and once I was seated under the neon lights of the Emergency Room waiting area, the Porter and I waved goodbye. A handsome medical team from Colombia, Algeria and Senegal x-rayed and bandaged my arm with great alacrity and good cheer - while coping with several regular 'patients' running amok in the hallways in white robes, dashing in and out of the examination rooms; harmless, it was explained, people in need of tea and attention and a place to go more than any medical treatment - and I was sent back to the Gare, supplied with a ticket for first-class and ushered onto the train with apologies and small bows. A man seated across the aisle had witnessed the fuss. He jumped up with a twinkle in his eye to help me store my luggage. A conversation began. It wasn't long before I understood that I was in the company of an International Cat Show Judge, the author of articles and books on distinctive feline breeds. In the hush of our comfortable compartment, I heard stories about the nitty-gritty of Cat Show politics as our train moved north.

I remember the jovial Cat Judge and the concerned Porter whenever I pass through the Gare du Nord. Usually I pause to get a feel of the motionless crowd and read the departure board, even though the track number for Amsterdam doesn't seem to vary. The public announcements have been updated to include an English-language health warning about flu symptoms, an audio nod, I believe, to the warm-hearted medical staff next door.