i have actually spent quite a lot of time in this country over the years. added all up i am sure it would be a fairly substantial number of months. but i dont ever really "get" holland. being here feels normal, i know my way around the major cities, i know the food and I have a surrogate home to stay in. Yet i could never imagine living here. i think it is just far too clean, that is surely the big difference between here and england. holland is clean and orderly, and the people are friendly and polite, but (like in england) you never seem to really get to know them, they are somehow always a step removed, and distant.
my days here are always the same, they are spent chatting with people who have known me since birth, eating, and watching roland garros. For some strange twist of timing, i happen to always be here while the great competition is taking place, and as the people i stay with are major tennis fans, who always spend some time watching the matches, especially when Rafael Nadal is playing. Despite several years of exposure, I barely understand the complex scoring system and need it explain to me yet again, every year. i dont know exactly why i am so slow on this matter, but i have given up worrying about it.
then, after tennis, i go for a walk along the canals and marvel at the incredible planning that must go into building these houses on the narrowest of land bridges, and on mini islands separated from the road by draw bridges and moats. the gardens are pretty and immaculate. i appreciate them as an outsider who doesnt understand about such matters can, with learned understanding. i throw bread to the cute ducks on their water nest and observe their peculiar method of communication. the canal in the backyard is patrolled by an authoritarian goose who quickly informs me that i have stepped to close to the nest, and i am obliged to take a step backwards. the after saying hello to the cats, i go back inside to play wordoku.
30.5.08
gatwick
I have never liked Gatwick airport. I just don’t see how it could be convenient for anyone. It is far from the centre, and unlike Luton, has the pretension of being a real international airport. The shopping is rubbish, and the ticket to get there ridiculously overpriced. I have also always thought it smelled. And yet, despite my efforts to avoid the place, I still unfortunately end up from time to time cooling my heels in the building, watching the people stagger about, dazed from jet lag, discussing their trip that has just come to an end, or the one that is just about to begin. I yawn and wait for my plane. It boards from gate 1, and the waiting room must be 45 degrees, stuffed as it is with English louts waiting for the wild adventures they imagine they are off to, and no ventilation system. The flight must be 85 percent male, and almost exclusively between the ages of 20 and 30. Such are the folk would board flights to Amsterdam!!
close encounters
I saw him the moment he entered the shop, it was like a flashback to the 1990s: black leather jacket, black leather trousers, black sunglasses, shaved head, no neck and a HUGE Orthodox gold cross dangling around his middle. I took one look and fled to a remote corner of the fiction section. He apparently headed downstairs, but did not find what he was looking for and approached the guys at the till down there. Apparently, even when he was still several metres away, one colleague told the other to call me. Sure enough, the phone rang on my floor and the duty manager asked me to come down to speak “to a Russian.” But the fellow was not Russian, he was from Vukovar, one of the saddest places I have ever been. During the war, he had joined a certain well-known Serbian paramilitary group, he fought in the krajina for the land he imagined to be his, and he killed lots of people (which he explained to me by air gesturing the act of using a machine gun, complete with sound effects, while my astounded colleagues watched on, from a safe distance). After the war, he went into the foreign legion, and then ended up doing “security” in Moscow. Whatever that means. I am not sure at which point he became a nut case. I suppose some people are just born bonkers, but I doubt this guy was. Rather, events ran their course and took their toll over time. He claimed to have been born in 1975, making him 16 when the war started. I imagined him as a semi-educated provincial who was suddenly given a gun and cause, but never any real background to go with it.
He wanted books on what he pronounced as “brutsele” which after several attempts and gestures I eventually understood was a Serbian rendering of “Bruce Lee,” this guy’s proclaimed hero (after the certain ex-paramilitary leader).
What was weird is that he insists his former leader is still alive today and directing a legion group. He claimed to have seen him, since the time when his brains were allegedly splattered over the carpet of a Belgrade lobby. I found this incredible to believe…I would say impossible even, except that I have learned never to use that word when applied to certain parts of the planet. He showed me some other pictures though, and they were gruesome enough.
As he left the shop, the entire building seemed to give a sigh of relief, myself included. There are things from my past I think I would prefer forgetting, and association with guys with gold chains and tattoos of big cats is certainly up there.
He wanted books on what he pronounced as “brutsele” which after several attempts and gestures I eventually understood was a Serbian rendering of “Bruce Lee,” this guy’s proclaimed hero (after the certain ex-paramilitary leader).
What was weird is that he insists his former leader is still alive today and directing a legion group. He claimed to have seen him, since the time when his brains were allegedly splattered over the carpet of a Belgrade lobby. I found this incredible to believe…I would say impossible even, except that I have learned never to use that word when applied to certain parts of the planet. He showed me some other pictures though, and they were gruesome enough.
As he left the shop, the entire building seemed to give a sigh of relief, myself included. There are things from my past I think I would prefer forgetting, and association with guys with gold chains and tattoos of big cats is certainly up there.
27.5.08
eurovision and more
so russia finally won eurovision, after coming close for several years in a row and watching several neighbouring countries win.
i cnant say i am a huge eurovision fan, although i attended in 2003 (or was it 2002?) in Estonia. but i will be curious to see how the russian authorities manage to arrange such an event, since the recent chelsea- man u football match revealed certain drawbacks to hosting events in moscow: there are very few hotel rooms in general, and those that exist tend to be in luxury business hotels aimed at guys with expense accounts, not tourists. furthermore, russian hotels tend to dramatically raise prices when they know many foreigners will be in town. and then the visa issue....
i might even be about next year for moscows eurovision moment.
sadly, my time working in the bookshop is coming to an end, after over a year and a half of working with endless amounts of fiction, i am moving on. i will be very sad to leave my collegues, many of whom are very cool, and sad as well to leave the books...but economics has forced me to look for better paid ways to spend my time. on my return from south america i sent my CV around, and got offers from the Guardian and from the russian media. i am going with the latter, as it pays better. more on that soon.
i cnant say i am a huge eurovision fan, although i attended in 2003 (or was it 2002?) in Estonia. but i will be curious to see how the russian authorities manage to arrange such an event, since the recent chelsea- man u football match revealed certain drawbacks to hosting events in moscow: there are very few hotel rooms in general, and those that exist tend to be in luxury business hotels aimed at guys with expense accounts, not tourists. furthermore, russian hotels tend to dramatically raise prices when they know many foreigners will be in town. and then the visa issue....
i might even be about next year for moscows eurovision moment.
sadly, my time working in the bookshop is coming to an end, after over a year and a half of working with endless amounts of fiction, i am moving on. i will be very sad to leave my collegues, many of whom are very cool, and sad as well to leave the books...but economics has forced me to look for better paid ways to spend my time. on my return from south america i sent my CV around, and got offers from the Guardian and from the russian media. i am going with the latter, as it pays better. more on that soon.
9.5.08
books
I recently gave in my notice at the bookshop. It has been a great 1.5 years but I need more money to pay off my student debt, so I had to start looking elsewhere.
And was lucky enough to be offered a job working for a Russian news agency, so we shall see where that will lead me.
But I will really miss my collegues at the book shop, as well as the books. One of the great parts of the job has been the constant exposure to new fiction, and realising just how much stuff is out there. I recently read Travesuras de la nina mala by the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, whom I have always detested. But we got his most recent book in English in the shop, and it looked interesting, so I decided to try to get over my prejudice and read it. I tracked it down in Spanish in Buenos Aires, and then oddly got given a French copy in paris….and I confess that I was completely mesmerized from the start. It is, ultimately, a twisted love story….the dynamics of the two main characters are troubling and uncomfortable. You know early on that there will be no happy ending here. The female main character is a deracinated modern madame bovary, incapable of supporting the bourgeois life proposed to her by the only man who truly loves her. But it is not only the perverse characters that drew me in. the novel sweeps through the second half of the 20th century, from peru in the 50s to paris in its early 60s heyday, to London in the late 60s and 70s to Tokyo in the 80s and Madrid in 90s. conservatism, Sartre, post structuralism, anti Vietnam protests in Trafalgar square, AIDS, high tech globalization- it is literally all there too, but only ever as an intriguing background.
So having got so wrapped up in the work, I decided to give Vargas Llosa’s writing’s another go, thinking my earlier prejudice was perhaps the remains of a more activist youth…..but no. on an Iberia flight to Madrid recently, I picked up an article he wrote in El Pais on Argentina. And he is, as I always thought, a twat. The article made me annoyed. It trashes the current argentine intellectual scene with the ressentiment of someone with a serious complex. Vargas Llosa has always annoyed me for his very right wing views, intolerance, and his self satisfied views towards his position. A brief scanning of recent articles in le Monde and el Pais confirmed I still find him as annoying as 10 years ago when I was studying the latin American Boom.
And yet I loved his last book. My friend Cesare pointed out you don’t have to like a writer to like his work, and he gave the excellent example of celine, an excellent writer, yet an appalling anti- semite and human. At work, my collegue james pointed out that surely SOME right-wingers are capable of producing quality literature, and correctly noted the way in which the European left has long monopolized the field. It is an interesting question….but ultimately what I look for is good fiction, and Travesuras de la nina mala more than provided me with that, to Vargas Llosa’s full credit.
And was lucky enough to be offered a job working for a Russian news agency, so we shall see where that will lead me.
But I will really miss my collegues at the book shop, as well as the books. One of the great parts of the job has been the constant exposure to new fiction, and realising just how much stuff is out there. I recently read Travesuras de la nina mala by the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, whom I have always detested. But we got his most recent book in English in the shop, and it looked interesting, so I decided to try to get over my prejudice and read it. I tracked it down in Spanish in Buenos Aires, and then oddly got given a French copy in paris….and I confess that I was completely mesmerized from the start. It is, ultimately, a twisted love story….the dynamics of the two main characters are troubling and uncomfortable. You know early on that there will be no happy ending here. The female main character is a deracinated modern madame bovary, incapable of supporting the bourgeois life proposed to her by the only man who truly loves her. But it is not only the perverse characters that drew me in. the novel sweeps through the second half of the 20th century, from peru in the 50s to paris in its early 60s heyday, to London in the late 60s and 70s to Tokyo in the 80s and Madrid in 90s. conservatism, Sartre, post structuralism, anti Vietnam protests in Trafalgar square, AIDS, high tech globalization- it is literally all there too, but only ever as an intriguing background.
So having got so wrapped up in the work, I decided to give Vargas Llosa’s writing’s another go, thinking my earlier prejudice was perhaps the remains of a more activist youth…..but no. on an Iberia flight to Madrid recently, I picked up an article he wrote in El Pais on Argentina. And he is, as I always thought, a twat. The article made me annoyed. It trashes the current argentine intellectual scene with the ressentiment of someone with a serious complex. Vargas Llosa has always annoyed me for his very right wing views, intolerance, and his self satisfied views towards his position. A brief scanning of recent articles in le Monde and el Pais confirmed I still find him as annoying as 10 years ago when I was studying the latin American Boom.
And yet I loved his last book. My friend Cesare pointed out you don’t have to like a writer to like his work, and he gave the excellent example of celine, an excellent writer, yet an appalling anti- semite and human. At work, my collegue james pointed out that surely SOME right-wingers are capable of producing quality literature, and correctly noted the way in which the European left has long monopolized the field. It is an interesting question….but ultimately what I look for is good fiction, and Travesuras de la nina mala more than provided me with that, to Vargas Llosa’s full credit.
8.5.08
paris
Spring is pan-european family errand time. The timing (april-june) and destinations (paris, Brussels, various small Dutch towns) are always the same, as are the missions. But this predictability does not make for boring excursions, rather there is something pleasant in the annual ritual. And so, I find myself sitting with yaelle, waiting for solenne by the assemble nationale, her latest place of employment. it is a ritual, every time i am in paris we have a reunion, the three of us. we have been doing it for over a decade, how time flies!
and next stop: gibert jeune....
and next stop: gibert jeune....
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