Niles, Hughes: I know who wrote this down for me

Haunting is the word most often applied to this song. Chances are that you already know I Wonder as I Wander, an Appalachian ballad heard on the street in North Carolina (USA) by John Jacob Niles. Niles, a Kentuckian singer and lover of traditional music, found the music produced by a ragged young girl enthralling. He paid her to repeat the song many times as he took notes. Niles subsequently brought the song from mountain towns to the world beyond. Now known across the globe as a Christmas Carol, the melody has been recorded by Mahalia Jackson, Joan Baez, Barbara Streisand and Placido Domingo, to name just a few. The latter I find quite distressing. This song needs to be heard a cappella.

Chances were not that I would hear the elderly John Jacob Niles himself perform the song live, a few years before he died in 1980, but I did. He was mesmerizing. Fortunately: a fellow student eventually wrote down the lyrics for me on what became a highly protected sheet of lined paper. See the handwriting: this artistic person was an accomplished calligrapher. She was, however, not able to lift words back off the page into the voice, as Niles did. But her script contains the sound of his voice for me, and I am grateful.

The phrase is clearly entrancing: I Wonder as I Wander became the title of the second volume of writer Langston Hughes’ autobiography, which appeared in 1956. Missouri-born Hughes was widely travelled: the USA, Mexico, Cuba, West Africa, France, Spain and the Netherlands (he was washing dishes at sea when he jumped ship in Rotterdam) – many were the states where he cast a critical eye on society and culture.

Not all of his peers viewed this as a strength. As Arnold Rampersad notes in his intriguing – indeed: gripping - 1992 introduction to the autobiography, one reviewer in the 1950's sneered that Hughes had done “more wandering than wondering.” The suggestion was that Hughes had failed to probe the compelling issues in his life, and of their times: the 1950’s, with political, social and racial differences polarizing in new post-WWII ways.

In the early 1930’s (when John Jacob Niles reportedly heard I Wonder as I Wander in Appalachia), Langston Hughes visited the Soviet Union and China. He always denied being a Communist, but he was on file at the FBI in the chilling McCarthy Era.

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.

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.

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.

Both Sides Now: Muoslak Muo?

Should this be your first encounter with the person of Oum Kalsoum (that's her at the mic in the above picture), you may want to look her up, and for that purpose you have numerous options, including : Umm Kulthum, Om Kalthoum, Oum Kalthum, Omm Kolsoum, Umm Kolthoum, Um Kalthoom) (Arabic: أم كلثوم ). Egypt’s most celebrated singer crossed the river in 1975 at the age of approximately seventy-five, give or take a few years, interrupting the workings of government in Cairo during three days of national mourning.

Certain elements are not what they first appear to be in the person of Oum Kalsoum. That’s how she got started: her father, an Imam at the mosque in their small village, dressed his pre-adolescent daughter as a boy so that she could mingle freely and practice with males instructed in religious song. Dad thought she was better than her brothers, and the deception paid off: she went on to become the greatest female vocalist of her time in the Arab World.

Amsterdam’s Royal Tropical Institute used to stage a monthly open-mic talent night. On one such evening, I watched a gifted Oum Kalsoum impersonator whip a crowd of men of Middle-Eastern origin into a clapping, cheering frenzy. The applause trickled off to a confused, out-of-sync splatter as the audience gradually realized that the impersonator was a man. After a few tense moments, the singer struck another great note, and the audience, either convinced by the talent or just determined to prolong this good night out, rose up to the occasion and began to sing along and sway in rhythm again.

With this idea in mind (the idea that initially comes to mind is ‘opposites which attract’ as a relative concept, subject to amendment as circumstances change), I was charmed by the image of Oum Kalsoum lyrics floating in two languages across a screen in illustration of her improvisational virtuosity and unparalleled ability to sustain notes. The original Arabic lyrics move from right to left, the English lyrics from left to right (okay, backwards, but the impressive timing is the same).

The screen occupied a small rectangle of space in an exhibition in a European capital devoted to Oum Kalsoum. As reflected above, the display/audiovisual array was complex: photographs, recordings, film and print documentation, clothing items, current fashion from the Middle East inspired by her look and, touchingly, even the vintage microphone and radios that carried her sound live to millions back in the day – it was all there. And all off-limits for photographers. Somehow this clandestine still from the video for musicologists reached my files. She was, by the way, born as Fatima Ibrahim al-Sayed al-Betagui. What happened after that is the stuff of musical magic, cultural cooperation and rivalry, intrigues, geopolitics and global wars, all on a large but also small, intimate scale.

Is/was on a Roll: English as Accessory Pt. 2

The July 23 LifeBeforeNews post was offered in the spirit of vacation. Vacation is still the dominant mode in Amsterdam, but meanwhile entries are piling up fast for ‘English as Accessory Pt.2’ (Please see ‘English as Accessory’ May 2, 2009) as the holiday season wears on. Please bear with me: your vocabulary list of Dutch words may be longer than you think, because they're English. And consider this: it turns out that third person singular present and simple past forms for the verb ‘to be’ (is/was) are identical in Dutch and English. You could be onto something.

Not so very long ago:

I was rearranging suitcase contents around midnight. The late cancellation of my flight out of a small regional airport in the USA (We apologize for the inconvenience. Please see our ticket desk for overnight vouchers) had resulted in my transfer to this nearby hotel, built on an awkward rectangular plot of land surrounded by new highways and access roads to industrial zones. Early morning would see me transferred back to the airfield – no need to unpack. I had been happy with the vending machine delivery of root beer (No meals are prepared here. Please visit our Food Lounge next to the elevators on the third floor), my childhood soft drink of choice. Cool sips, TV news in the background, as I puttered.

A voice in the news report caught my attention. The woman was speaking English, easily and fluidly, with a Dutch accent. I didn’t believe much of what she was saying (defending her son, who was a suspect in connection with a young woman’s disappearance on a Caribbean island), but hearing her made me homesick for my hood in the Netherlands. I had been away for several months. Her tones in English were/are part of the daily setting in my second homeland. Not only when English is spoken, but also when English is inserted into Dutch. (as I mentioned, Please see LBN post of May 2, 2009: “English as Accessory”)

Please find below a list of words, compounds and phrases from the English language, shown in context in above images; all common usage (in certain circles) in spoken and written Dutch:

Time heals everything
Claim (cultuur = culture)

Thrill
T-shirt
Service
Privacy
Killer
keukenDesign (keuken = kitchen)
Finest hour
Diehard
Corporate

The May 2 post included:

splendid isolation

for Kids
Outlet
Copyright or wrong

In focus
Update
Never a dull moment
Next
Something rotten

Now back to my vacation.

Down the Drain with Confucius

One of the great tenets of social cohesion is slated to adorn a drain pipe, or line gutter, near me. The Golden Rule “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” was voted in by residents of a neighbourhood in the Dutch capital. Five proverbs attributed to the Chinese sage Confucius were in the running.

While many do credit Confucius, others say the author was Epictetus, the Greek philosopher who may have played a larger role in passing on the idea in Western culture. Whether he did or not, it makes a great story: Epictetus, born a slave in 55 A.D., self-taught, freed from slavery by Nero and later thrown out of Rome by Domitian. Lame, sickly, and he never actually wrote anything, but his teachings were written down by his students and eventually influenced Marcus Aurelius - the Roman emperor who noted his thoughts in Greek during the Golden Age of the Roman Empire.

Epictetus was one of the later Stoics, who advocated harmony with nature and kindness towards all children of Zeus. As a child, I was taught that Jesus came up with the Golden Rule, but it’s advice extended by most world religions and thought systems. One of the earliest versions indeed comes from Confucius, whose name was given to Amsterdam’s “Confucius Square” (Dutch: Confuciusplein) in the western reaches of the city. The Square is being revamped, and in honor of the Sage, a drain pipe or gutter to be fixed in the ground at the edge of the new terrain will be inscribed with the Dutch-language version of the proverb. The photo is already available, thanks to Grijsen Park & Straatdesign (see post from May 2, 2009 “English as Accessory”).

EU Election Anxieties

When I sent off my absentee ballot to vote in the US elections last Fall, I devised and enclosed a self-addressed stamped postcard bearing the message that my ballot had been safely received by the Florida officials. They sent it back to me! Another feel-good moment in the November 2008 US elections!

This week, I’ve been reminded that election ballots can be fearful to behold: the Dutch version of the ballot for the EU parliamentary elections features 289 candidates representing 17 parties, as depicted on the sample ballot you see above. A resident of the Netherlands, I can vote if I want to: I’m a dual national. The non-Dutch side of my dualism tells me that before voting I should know something about all of the candidates, but of course I don't, so there's some tension in this pre-election phase.

(The European Parliament in Strasbourg unites over 600 elected officials from all member states. Most of the electorate has trouble measuring the impact of the huge EU bureaucracy on our lives. But urgent issues abound: asylum-seekers + anti-asylum-seekers, undocumented workers + people smugglers (for the sex industry or agricultural work – recently a Dutch asparagus farm was busted on charges of holding Roumanian workers as slaves), angry farmers + inhumane animal transporters, environmental sustainability, trade, defense, terrorism, etc.…)

There are a couple of parties I won’t vote for: not on the European level, not in the Netherlands. And now one of those groups has become an EU ‘list-partner’ for the party of my initial choice, which makes it no longer my choice. The party which is no longer my choice is led in the Dutch Parliament by a man who first drew my admiration when serving the Dutch government in The Hague as ‘Reform and Kingdom Relations Minister.’ (Kingdom Relations refers to the former colonies in the Caribbean) At the time he was labeled ‘disloyal’ on more than one occasion, including the Fall of 2005 when he accused the Dutch Prime Minister of scare-mongering with constant warnings about terrorism. Then he ran media gauntlets after describing the political climate in The Hague as ‘filthy and nasty.’ He was supposed to deal with reform, but no one expected him to start talking about that kind of reform.

If I eventually do understand why his party has teamed up with a group I cannot support, a feel-good (or not quite as bad) moment might be closer by. Explanations have been circulating for weeks, but I'm not buying them.

Your Daughter is with Us - Pt.5

When asked why I choose to live in Europe rather than in my native North America, I have on occasion been known to reply:

Things didn't work out that well over there. We're all coming back.

Just kidding! Some people laugh with me. Others are alarmed. Let's face it, this is basically an out-emigration continent, and it can take a while for both immigrants and natives to adjust.

An update from friends a few hours down the road in France: Hua was nine years old, an undocumented resident of Paris, when police picked her up in the metro and took her into custody a couple of years ago, triggering a recovery effort by French neighbors and social activists who succeeded in reuniting child with (undocumented) parents before the day was done.

Episodes 1-4 about Hua’s life in Paris are here:

Pt 1 - May 31, 2007
Pt 2 - June 25, 2007
Pt 3 - September 14, 2007
Pt.4 – July 21, 2008

Hua's release, on that first frightening night, became possible when the Chinese-made document declaring little Hua to be living in the company of her legal parents was declared acceptable by the French authorities responsible for minors. The 'document' was certainly as valid as the flimsy ‘lease’ provided by the French landlord. Nevertheless, when the landlord decided things were getting too hot under his feet, he forced Hua, a new baby brother and her parents out of the shack under the stairwell of the apartment complex.

It would have been hard to relocate to something worse. And indeed, they moved to a place with more light, and then moved again, to a place with two rooms, allowing the parents to rent out one of the rooms to a single Chinese man. Hua continues to attend school and her French has improved enough for her to describe her displeasure with the fact that she is now, at age 11, home alone in the afternoon and evenings (her mother works until late in the evening and the father has been hospitalized), taking care of her baby brother while in the company of this male lodger. She doesn’t like him very much. She didn’t say why.

Meanwhile, my friend, who still lives in the building where Hua and her parents lived until the baby was born, has befriended a pair of little Chinese boys who live upstairs in an apartment with windows opening to a view of my friend’s door below. The boys have discovered that they can come and chat with her if she is at her ground-floor window, but more importantly, that she will help if their drunken father begins to beat up their mother. My friend once called the police on him, and believes that her presence might not save the mother from beatings, but it might keep her alive. The boys no longer feel trapped and alone upstairs when violence breaks out – they can fling open their window and call down to their new French friend.

Immigration issues are sticky wickets all around Europe, and with elections for the European Parliament coming up soon, the anti-foreigner temperature is rising. On this blog, on March 3, 2008 (see: A Win-Win Situation), I stated that the right-wing Dutch PVV Freedom Party was losing some of its steam. I was dead wrong! A recent poll of political parties positioned the PVV as the FRONT-RUNNER, the largest party in the Netherlands. Polls can be off the mark, but few will dispute the staying power of this anti-immigration anti-Islam group. If the poll is accurate and if the PVV does expand to the point of qualification for inclusion in a government coalition - who knows what will happen? A number of (centrish and leftish) parties have vowed to never enter into a coalition with the PVV, the Dutch variant on anti-foreigner fevers registering throughout Europe.

If only there was more time. My native North America has its own new immigration problems to solve, but some of the old ones worked themselves out. If people just pile in decade after decade, stuff happens.

In New York’s East Village I lived on a Ukranian block where the women wore headscarves while scrubbing the front steps of our apartment buildings. Baseball games were organized during quiet hours on the street by the tiny Puerto Rican grocery store mid-block. We were all watched over by the self-appointed neighbourhood guards, the Jamaican Rasta’s, who scared off purse-snatchers and other ne’er-do-wells at all hours of the day and night.

These were old tenement buildings originally constructed without any sanitary facilities. Rodent control experts occasionally made the rounds. I was in a conundrum one day when I couldn’t get one such expert, a huge, friendly guy now living in a New York suburb, to leave, after he performed his anti-rodent duties. His reluctance to depart had nothing to do with me (or the mice) – he was overcome with nostalgia. The big man shed tears at my table as he described having grown up in a railroad apartment similar to mine, with the whole family jammed into two rooms. He came through the rough & tumble well and did what most do: he emigrated to a more spacious environment nearby, with an entire house for his own family, and a lawn to mow.

It's just not the same as being all close with your family and neighbors, all the time, and those stories of making do with less are not very interesting to my kids.

Maybe later on, when they’re bigger?

That, too, takes time.

English as Accessory

Learning Dutch involves making choices. Depending on where you live, you may or may not want to take on the local accent and vocabulary (regional dialects are another issue altogether). Differences in pronunciation can be significant – perhaps less for foreigners more accustomed to adjusting to new sounds than for, let’s say, Dutch TV-makers, who are prone to adding subtitles when non-mainstream native Dutch speakers are on screen.

Students of Dutch familiar with English, German, Swiss-German and Danish have a head-start in the language-learning process in the Netherlands, but newcomers who don’t speak English at all may be at a disadvantage. Knowing which English words or phrases to use, and when to do it, adds a certain je ne sais quoi to one’s Dutch.

Consider these few random examples encountered in recent weeks:

The nation’s leading evening newspaper, the NRC Handelsblad, stays high-brow in an editorial on Holland’s faltering judicial system by referring to something rotten.

Their morning tabloid edition targets the mobile generation with the name NRC Next.

The need for speed also peppers the speech of a producer of a jittery prime time talk show, where, as the producer concedes, haste can unhinge a script, but it’s TV and there’s never a dull moment.

Streamlined modernity shapes the program title InFocus (an example of how English words are sometimes combined into one for the Dutch variant) and its Update from the Muslim Broadcasting Company (in a system with Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Humanist and other secular broadcasting organizations).

A music sector network opts for misguided word play (that’s when it gets irritating) in framing their discussion Copyright or wrong… on authors’ rights.

Clearly a wrong decision was made when a woman named ‘Lies’ (Dutch pronunciation = ‘Lease’) created a store name by combining her own name with an English-language description of the business, resulting in Lies. For Kids. Good luck there!

I am, however, grateful to the Dutch journalist and author John Jansen van Galen who offers splendid isolation as an option for this country’s noisy right-wing PVV Freedom Party.

It's still there, in case you were wondering

Torture and Tourism: a European Perspective

Once upon a time, a seasonal exhibition was launched in Amsterdam, an educational money-maker: Medieval Torture, the freak/horror show, no longer on the sidelines of a recreational circus. The public would pay to stream through: relieved when spewed out at the other end, steadied by the thought of having learned something. The public (natives and foreign visitors alike) so loved this exhibition that it earned the right to become a permanent fixture. Inside this recreational success, guaranteed to scare, visitors can read up on the past in Dutch, English, German, French, Spanish and Italian.

The organizers understand that it’s not only fear of pain and suffering that will attract crowds – it’s the option of stepping into the role of executioner, or inflicting pain, that animates others. During a football competition of importance a couple of years ago, a cardboard figure of a well-known German player from the relatively recent past was propped up by the street entrance and museum visitors invited to spit on him, mimicking the act of a revered Dutch player at a game. The Dutchman, a man of color, was said to have been responding to specific remarks made by the German player against a backdrop of racist chants coming from the crowd. Dutch nationalism, often struggling for definition, has gained a profile at times like this, when defense of the national good is intended to come at the expense of Germans, the occupiers during World War II. The conflict escalated, and the two players in question were suspended. The (by now apparently resolved) conflict happened nearly two decades ago, but the Torture Museum thought that tapping into residual feelings of hate or aggression would be lucrative PR. The good news is that the target figure was removed from their entryway – enough complaints rolled in to convince them that this could put a dent in ticket sales.

The Torture Museum in Amsterdam continues to do well, but this is not only a Continental success story. Across the Channel in the UK, the legacy of 'Tudor torture' adorns pencil sets, notebooks and badges sold in shops wherever recreational and cultural pursuits cross paths.

Those Persians

A professor of Iranian origin now working in the Netherlands introduced Persian culture as 'the place where Asia kissed the Middle East.' I'm sure he said 'kissed.' He may also have said 'embraced' in the next sentence or two. It's possible that he also referred to China kissing Turkey. What's absolutely certain is that he referred to a mutual acquaintance of South Asian origin with significant disdain, more or less attributing this person's abrasive - as he saw it - personality to ethnicity. It struck me at the time as ironic that while pressing the point of a multicultural or pluralist tradition in his homeland, where there had been a unique and extended period of ecstatic cultural exchange and expression, he also illustrated some of the residual irritations that can remain visible, like scar tissue, when personalities clash.

Kavir is (was?? has the global crisis closed it down??) a pluralist Persian culinary zone in Glasgow, offering Carrot & Persian Ice Cream Milkshakes, Persian herbal tea and all variety of smoothies. I found their sign rather alluring, and I hope they've not had to fold. My Persian connections are scattered, but detailed, and luckily for me, publicity around an exhibition at the British Museum on 17th-century Iran draws another epic description of Silk Route dramas in centuries past in the days of glory in Isfahan, where, as it happened, the going currency was a silver coin mined by slaves of Spanish conquistadores, but manufactured by the mercantile Dutch. Who's kissing who, I mean, really?

My first Iranian connection was probably during my grade school years in New Jersey, when I played with the daughter of a carpet importer. After that, on my first flight from West to East, the standard pre-landing announcement from the cockpit was slightly amended to Ladies and Gentlemen, we will land shortly at Teheran Airport, where the local time is 1500 years in the past.

In contrast: I received a congratulatory card on International Women's Day once and only once - from a forward-thinking Iranian exile in Holland. And in the new Millenium, I was witness to the bizarre application of a dynamic, modern survey of the pro-active and largely successful Iranian minority in the Netherlands. In academics and many other fields, (Dutch-) Iranians are forging ahead.

Nevertheless, it was a bit of surprise when a Canadian friend was drawn into this survey as being one of them. Amsterdam city records showed his mother's place of birth as being Teheran, where she indeed first appeared on this earth as the daughter of English oil company employees temporarily residing in Iran. He was thereby classified as an Iranian in Holland, and when the survey of his lifestyle and habits was done, there was no way to clarify his true background. I know, because I sat in as a witness.

It was quite a shock to see that the barrier to providing accurate information was built into the software on the laptop provided to the interviewer by the marketing company being paid by government and/or city funds (taxpayers) to generate useful data on Holland's new demographics. The Canadian interviewee repeatedly explained the circumstances of his mother's birth in Teheran, but there was no way of recording this history. Another strange question concerned the subject's social life: do you spend more time with your own group (Iranians) or with Dutch people?? He asked: what about everyone else? But there was no way to file accurate details.

Te gek voor woorden - too crazy for words - an expression which I now can hope to learn in Farsi, thanks (to end on a high note) to the recent publication of a Compilation of Idioms in Dutch & Persian. The book's author is a Teheran-born long-time resident of the Netherlands and a certified interpreter and translator. Farsi, as it happens, is Iran's official language - but there many dozens of others.

The Secrets of Thialf

The Medicine Wheel is central to the culture of the Plains Indians in North America. It is a sacred symbol for all knowledge. The eye-shaped Medicine Wheel shown here was printed in the TIPI Newsletter.

The Thialf Hall in the Netherlands is a state-of-the-art skating rink where major international competitions are held.

[Please see also post March 3, 2008, 'A Win-Win Situation', where I hinted at the imminent demise of a certain right-wing politician in the Netherlands, only now, a year later, to be proven quite inaccurate in my forecast, as a new poll suggests that his right-wing party would WIN elections in the Kingdom of the Netherlands if they were held today; this same personality has just enjoyed publicity on right-wing talk shows and with conservative groups in the United States, after being refused entrance to the United Kingdom, where he had been invited to screen his anti-Islam movie in the House of Lords - so let's keep an eye, so to speak, on these new alliances!]

The Thialf covered oval arena was named after Thialfi, servant to the Nordic God Thor ("the chief defender of the gods and of humans against the evil forces of the giants and chaos" Encyclopedia Britannica Vol 5 p.215). Thor is more commonly known today as the God of Thunder. The climate control system applied in the Thialf Hall is depicted below.

The smaller photo showing the Medicine Wheel again also carries a computer view of one of my eyes (an image I recalled while studying the technical information about the ice-skating arena) the results of an examination carried out to assess the potential benefits of 'night lenses': contact lenses to be worn while sleeping. These relatively large inserts alter the surface of your eye during the night, allowing something close to normal vision during the day. I did try them for a spell, but abandoned the night lenses after I discovered that, after dark, the lights of oncoming cars were refracted into blinding displays, like lightning.

I Promise You

Some good news in the final weeks of 2008: this Polish-language sign was removed from the window of a store in my Amsterdam neighbourhood. I do not read Polish (please see http://lifebeforenews.blogspot.com/2007/06/no-vocabulary.html) but upon inquiring inside was told that it warned potential shop-lifters of the presence of security camera’s. Theft had become a major problem for retailers in 2008; a majority of those caught came from Eastern Europe. Polish was selected as the most effective language of deterrence. I will eventually ask why the sign was removed. For the moment, I’m banking on a cheerful explanation: robberies were down/the shop-owners decided not to stigmatize Poles/the sign did not enhance the Holiday mood.

The Holiday Season began to gather steam for me in the post-Thanksgiving and Sint Maarten period, as Dutch Muslims were gathering for the Eid al-Adha and others had just celebrated Sinterklaas, which I acknowledged at a weekend dinner party held mostly in anticipation of Chanukah at the home of a non-observant Jewish friend who grew up celebrating Christmas in Pennsylvania in the USA. There are those who would launch the winter celebrations in October with Halloween, running straight on past Chinese New Year (I have been advised to muster up lots of patience for the Year of the Ox) beyond the Ides of March and, why not, into Easter.

At the dinner party, we had a heated discussion about whether the City of Amsterdam is acting wisely in reducing soft-drug trade and red-light areas for prostitution. Arguments were made for protection of and health care for prostitutes to prevent their disappearance into illegal brothels where trafficked women (most are women, majority trafficked) and men from all over the world are held against their will. The economy of Amsterdam is fed not just by museum-goers and lovers of Indonesian food, but also significantly by soft-drug visitors from neighboring countries, Brits on wild weekends, and by hooker-gawkers from around the globe, including families who link hands with grandparents and kids, stroll by the windows and stare at the women as though studying an amusement park theme. Visitors also have a chance to stroll around sex-shops, such as the one just visible in the photo above, across from the store that had displayed the warning sign in Polish.

Still at the dinner party, a gay man, a long-time resident of Amsterdam, said he fears that a conservative crackdown on prostitution would damage the local economy and eventually result in correspondingly conservative anti-gay backlash-legislation. So!..If you plan to visit Amsterdam in the New Year, even as a one-day cruise ship visitor or a transit passenger at Schiphol Airport, do enjoy the architecture, museums, music, harbour ferries and good coffee! The city is already transitioning into a revised self – which would include less exploitation of women from far-off lands – it just hasn’t yet decided how to pay for it, what with so much money being allocated to over-budget transportation projects and the like. Give a call if you pass through town. I promise to show you a good time! Happy 2009!

He never knew how much this meant to me

I waited, but when the Friday evening paper was hours overdue, I finally called the customer service desk. Promises were made about passing on the information to the local distribution point in Amsterdam. Monday came, and the paper fell through the mail slot early, folded around a hand-written note on scrap-paper which read (in French, rather than in Dutch or English, the de facto second language in Holland): I apologize for not having delivered the paper on Friday, The message ended with a comma. Time probably ran out before inclination. I was astounded by the courtesy displayed, and curious about his choice of language, assuming that he was from a former French colony in (North) Africa.

Soon afterwards I saw the delivery man at work as he approached my house on a bicycle with protective carrier baskets over the rear wheel. He lowered the kick-stand, pulled out one newspaper and stepped up to my front door with a serious limp. One hip was higher, one leg twisted in what appeared to be a polio survivor’s stance. I opened the door and thanked him for the note. He beamed, repeated his apology and explained that he had been educated in his homeland Morocco in French.

My subscription ran out, I didn’t renew and I never saw him again until our paths crossed much later at a post office in another neighbourhood. We smiled in recognition and had a chat. He reported having been promoted to delivery supervisor and moving house with his wife and new baby. The limp has not improved, so he'll be easy to spot from a distance as time goes on.

New Words in Dutch used in English

A credit card company offered me thirty free minutes on (in?) a golf simulator (I looked it up: a golf simulator [the Dutch word is formed by joining the two English words, and the Dutch word was used in spite of the fact that the advertisement was distributed in English], not surprisingly, creates a sort of virtual golf), thus engaging my brain in one of a myriad of wasted moments of alarm and desolation triggered by marketing campaigns.

Even though I have acknowledged feelings of being harassed by golf and its marketing campaigns since the final decade of the 20th-century, the point at which I created computer and paper files to accommodate my habit of holding on to all golf-related information which came my way, and in spite of the fact that the feelings of harassment have been toned down by my having recently embarked on a quest to find peace with golf, the truth is that it’s one of the few sports that really bothers me. I have chosen not to speak up until now, largely because a good number of individuals I like and even love are or have been committed to golf to some extent. For the time being I find it unnecessary to embellish upon the specific issues which might bring sadness to others.

It may seem that I have done everything possible to avoid talking about golf with that vulnerable group of devotees, but this is not the case. I have in fact actively pursued the subject of golf, in a manner that would allow me to learn more about the science of the sport, and explanations of certain golf-specific subjects, such as the handicap system, have invariably been complex and truly interesting. I have even gone out to play on a real golf course, dressed in golf clothes. It rained that afternoon, so the game was cancelled.

Some of the subjects in my golf files (which exist under the general heading of ‘The Rise and Fall of the Global anti-Golf Movement’ ) include: golf simulators, golf and globalization, fair pay for caddies, regional land disputes, farmland sold to golf course developers, farmers forced off their land to make way for golf courses, farmers who take up golf in their spare time, burial grounds excavated to create golf courses, environmentally-friendly golf courses, climate change and the future of golf, golf colors/fashions and accessories, the golf course as sanctuary, my Father’s private golf course in our back yard, growth and loss sectors in the golf industry, the history of golf, golf in China, golf etiquette, gender and race on the golf course, etc. Contributions to the archive are always appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Not Barefoot in the Park / No Naked Flames on Pentecostal Weekend Ferry

Drought warnings are in effect in parts of the Dutch countryside. But in Amsterdam, a city of canals, the sunny weather has been highly appreciated over the past week, since before Liberation Day 2008 - that's May 5th. Liberation Day marks the release in 1945 from Nazi occupation during World War II. Things have gone pretty well in Holland since then. Holidays are considered a basic right for all inhabitants of the Netherlands, and more than 20% of the Dutch population has reportedly been on vacation in the first half of May. This is good. It helps relieve the congestion in Amsterdam. Most city parks, and some waterways (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OfMOHdlpP8), sponsor holiday activities, with vendor markets, games for children and live music.

In one park in eastern Amsterdam, the activities reflect the local population: the merchants selling clothing, music and handicrafts are Dutch, Indian, African, Surinamese, Antillean and so on. Potential buyers reflect the same lines of descent. Many take their small children to the park’s wading pool, a large, clean circle of water surrounded by grass. One of the signs around the area warns of broken glass and other dangerous objects on the ground. The visual warning hangs too high for children to notice. I was interested in the policy at the city office responsible for this park so I called and asked whether language (multiple, in this neighbourhood) considerations played a role in deciding to feature the pained foot above glass, with no verbal reinforcement, on the sign.

A receptionist thought that it was a message discouraging people from leaving glass in the area. The person in charge of all park signs was out of the office, possibly all week, on vacation, as I said, and perhaps into next week as well, as the third major holiday in May (the first was Remembrance Day, on May 4th, honouring all War Dead, including WWII and all other conflicts) is today, with Whit Sunday or Pentecost, a Christian holiday which is an official holiday for all inhabitants of the Netherlands. The event is recalled differently in separate churches, but it all ties in with the idea of the Holy Spirit returning to man – according to certain groups: as tongues of fire settling on top of the Apostles’ heads! Extraordinary! This allowed them to speak in tongues, to all who would listen. The subject remains highly controversial in our times. It's an issue with, for example, the “Glossolalia Movement.”

No Naked Flames suddenly appeared as an apt warning on the ferry which carried me over a river yesterday, at the start of this holiday weekend.

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.

Peace without Printed Matter Pt.1

Free local newspapers, advertising brochures with shopping coupons, neighborhood weeklies, take-out menu’s and single-sheet ads for everything from chimney-sweeping and fortune telling to computer courses are plunked down on adjoining treads of the stone staircase leading up from the sidewalk to the front doors of four apartments, of which one is mine. In this country we have the option of pasting “Yes” or “No” stickers on the outside of mail slots, indicating acceptance or refusal of unsolicited printed matter. Some people are happy to find all of the above-mentioned stock lying inside on their door mat. The refusals can mount up, visually represented by the piles of paper cluttering the steps. Strong winds carry the loose sheets up and down the street. Paper, plastic bags, candy wrappers, cigarette butts and fallen leaves are blown to shelter behind the wheels of bicycles chained to the stands allotted by city authorities. Counter-gusts send a similar trail into shrubs and sturdy stems in the narrowest of strip gardens, created by removing concrete sidewalk tiles from the ground where the pavement meets the apartment building walls.

When advertisements from nearby stores lie on the steps for days, I have been known to carry the damp, dirty bundle over to the shops in question to point out that their expensive printing project was not going according to plan, and to ask them if they might renegotiate distribution contracts to include instructions that printed matter not be left in the open air. So far almost no one in the stores - however stressed by the environmentally-unfriendly evidence - has felt able to identify the point of origin of delivery, much less exert any influence. I abandoned that effort.

One day, as I walked down the street, I saw a woman pushing a shopping cart filled with printed matter. She was a middle-aged Dutch woman, very engaged with her work and completely open to conversation about recycling and keeping the streets clean. Apparently she had been instructed to leave bundles of paperwork halfway up the steps from the street, thereby encouraging residents themselves to retrieve items of their interest as they walk up to the apartment entrances. Going all the way up the stairs to check for “Yes” and “No” stickers on the mail slots was too time-consuming. And finding lots of “No” stickers would mean that she - with back troubles - would be stuck with excess matter at the end of her route, and it would all be thrown out anyway, so why not leave it on the steps, allowing residents who didn’t want it there to cart it off to the nearby paper recycling bins? She understood my point of view, however, and promised, whenever possible, to not leave papers lying around. I see her from time to time, but I’ve also noticed that certain kinds of hand-outs are now delivered by persons of foreign origin, badly dressed, thin - possibly undocumented workers, earning a pittance by handing out flyers. Most recycled paper from the Netherlands is sold to China for the immensely profitable recycling industry there, which, I now understand, is enormously polluting. The family behind China’s recycling industry has accumulated great wealth. I still do recycle, although I'm not sure why.

All Tar No Feathers

I tried to get a specific and clear appraisal of the roof problem from the plumber-turned-roof repairman still lingering in the doorway before he bolted down the stairs and vanished. I say ‘bolt’ because of his surname, which translates into English as “Rabbit,” and I imagined him, reluctant as he had been to use the ladder leading to the skylight roof access, applying equal strength of feeling to the moment of departure. We had climbed up onto the flat roof shared by adjoining buildings, hoping to see an obvious explanation of the new leakage once again leaving a delta of dark stains on my ceiling. There was in fact nothing at all ‘rabbity’ about the man, a lanky Dutchman with a broad, confident smile, unless one considers his enjoyment of conversation in a negative light. I did not. I was surprised, in several ways (mainly because he had initially politely turned down the customary offer of coffee/tea after descending from the roof and then suddenly said ‘Well let’s have that cup of tea’ when I persisted in my efforts to extract some meaning from this excursion to the roof, part of a long drawn-out sequence of viewings, assessments, e-mails, conversations and shoveling of roof debris into garbage bags), but my surprise diminished with the subsequent observation that his eagerness to converse found quite coherent expression.
The subject matter, it must be said, was changed almost immediately, from the roof dilemma to intercommunal frictions in the Netherlands. He asked for my opinion of an anti-immigration/anti-Islam Dutch Parliamentarian who attracts considerable attention with his inflammatory remarks about not only Muslims in general and their Holy Book in particular, but about most of his left-of-center colleagues and Her Majesty the Queen as well, remarks which have considerable following in the Netherlands, as demonstrated by his emphatic victory at the polls. In reply, I acknowledged that the Parliamentarian was successful in occupying the limelight but in the end must be seen as mostly destructive, prescribing more sanctions against those he did not like than solutions for problems facing us all. “Mr. Rabbit” revealed that he is a loyal Christian Democrat at election time, but one who is not indifferent to the persuasive arguments of the right-wing rabble-rouser, the only person addressing his anxieties experienced on the street where he lives when surrounded by roughly-hewn individuals of North African descent, most of whom do not appear to like him. Some of whom get away with very bad behaviour, when what is needed is severe punishment for their crimes, as demonstrated by the outbreak of extreme violence in Iraq following the defeat of the dictator Saddam Hussein. These people, he said, without wishing to offend anybody, clearly need to have the lid kept on tight, and if things do get a bit out of hand, force should be used to maintain order.
The conversation had shifted considerably from the moment in the doorway when I was intent upon gleaning something, anything, useful in thinking further about the roof. I tried in vain to return to the subject of repair, talking about the more recent efforts on the roof next to ours. I offered to show him the video I had made of the East European workers loading up the rubbish container under the supervision of a Dutch team leader, who became nervous when I popped up through the skylight and began documenting their labors which involved, with our permission, use of our roof space for their supplies.

The plumber didn’t want to see the video, so I tried to get him back on the topic of the disposal of roof rubble, which, in our case, had been left in our hands. The City Waste Collection Service, I had been told, will not retrieve roof debris containing dirt and vegetation as it could hold toxic waste. We had a dozen or so bags needing transport to a different kind of disposal lot, where the license plates of approaching cars are computer-checked as the driver approaches the entrance gate to verify the address of the owner and confirm eligibility for that particular dumping site. We never got that far, because someone bribed the city garbage collectors that same morning and they removed the whole lot. I don’t blame them for a minute. The garbage collectors receive little thanks for what they do, and the ultimate sham was perpetrated by the City itself, when a series of posters were printed in expression of gratitude towards these people. The words (in translation) “Thanks Joe!” (or other names, depending on the picture) accompanied images of smiling, handsome street cleaners and rubbish collectors - later exposed as male models! The workmen themselves weren't good enough? Some thanks. I had hoped to engage the plumber on these and other issues, but a pot of tea only goes so far.