Thursday, March 20, 2008

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.)

Monday, March 3, 2008

A Win-Win Situation

















He is losing his edge, the articulate right-winger in The Hague who has provided one-liners and sound-bites for what seems like a very long time already. In one of his recent anti-Muslim rants, in this case connected with burkhas (or was it the burkhini?), he stood in front of camera’s - wearing a dark suit and light-colored shirt, as do most of his many dozens of male colleagues darting back and forth across the glimmering hallways of government buildings - and referred to women wearing burkha’s as ‘penguins.’

This Dutch parliamentarian with startling bleached blonde hair, from the PVV “Freedom Party” is (possibly) celebrating his breakthrough onto the international scene, as the person responsible for an anti-Islam anti-Koran film, not yet released, which has now triggered anti-Dutch demonstrations on the streets of northern Afghanistan. The Dutch government has officially distanced itself from the blonde’s inflammatory message, which could lead to loss of life; NATO officials have warned of further disturbances. For months the focus has been on the polarizing Parliamentarian and what to do about him. He doesn’t need official bodyguards - he has had them for years.

The film might just suddenly be there on the internet, but even if it never actually appears, the PVV-penguin will have enjoyed enormous attention because of his ability to aggravate and offend, one word at a time. I was recently reminded that it is quite easy to do this by drawing people’s attention to something that they don’t understand. That can be unpleasant. I wore a sign with core-Dutch content and non-Dutch form, so designed, I thought at the time, to draw attention to the message. This was not entirely the case.

The sign with white letters on an orange background reads in Dutch as ‘Hup Nederland!’ which translates as ‘Let’s go Netherlands!’ A more authentic rendition of the original cheer would have been spelled out as the alliterative ‘Hup Holland Hup!’ in Dutch as displayed in blue letters on the orange t-shirt manufactured for soccer/football fans from Holland.* This sign was designed by a Dutch citizen of partial Dutch descent, raised outside of the Netherlands, now a dual national here and in his country of origin, where his parents had settled as immigrants.

His choice of wording was, as far as I know, an unintentional step away from the norm. His choice of font, on the other hand, was deliberate, inspired mainly by the fact that said choice, once the exclusive province of typesetters, is now open to anyone at all. “Freedom of font,” you could say. The sign was assembled as a lark. He had not expected me to either print it or wear it, and his ambitions were totally divorced from social concerns. It became apparent while displaying the sign that this sign, which tricks the reader into thinking that the text is in Arabic, was unsettling to a small group of natives seated nearby.

On this occasion, an international skating championship in a Dutch (skating) town, the number of non-Dutch spectators would have been restricted to an infinitesimally small group, meaning that nearly all onlookers would focus warily on the sign because of its apparent foreignness. Initially skeptical of the non-Dutch English-speakers in their midst, those nearest by gradually became elbow-nudging allies, pleased that we were armed with lists of the draws for races and quick to comment on the athletes as they stepped up to face the start pistol. At this level, the Dutch skating fans cheer for everyone, and even losers are heartily applauded for achieving a personal best.

*The remarkable ambivalence of the Dutch national anthem, printed on the back of this t-shirt, will be focused on in future posts.