Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. "A gaunt old man with eyes in pain." (after 1770). From the series of so-called "character heads" in the Upper Belvedere, Vienna, Austria.
The other day, my brother said, “I think words like ‘ouch’ are left over from the first language.”
And then he dared me to weigh in. So I did. What I discovered–as is often the case when I dive into etymology–was both fascinating and surprising.
For example, according to the OED, the earliest examples of “ouch” are all American. This isn’t to say we Americans were the first to ever hit our thumbs with a hammer, but I never expected this particular derivation of a pain word to have developed in the States! The OED claims that “ouch” possibly derives from the German “autsch” (used exactly as we usually use it in English) by way of the Pennsylvania Germans, though there’s no direct evidence of this yet.
However, the OED then points us to “ow,” with the earliest written expression dating to 1834. It, like “ouch,” is labeled as “probably imitative,” but the OED editors aren’t willing to guess any further as to its origins other than to point us–yet again–to the older “ou” (same word, but it’s unclear whether English picked it up through Spanish or Scottish) and the positively ancient “O”. (“Oh,” from which our friend Homer derived the contemporary “d’oh”,* is a modern variation of “O”.) “O” is a liturgical expression (you still see it a lot in bible translations and in early hymns), but it means the same thing: an expression of surprise or sudden emotion. We get the word from Old English, which took it from Latin, which in turn brought it over from Greek.
Interestingly, though, there are similar but separately evolved versions of “O” found in Old Irish, Old Welsh, Lithuanian, Latvian, Old Church Slavanic, various old- and middle-German and Scandinavian languages, and so on.
That, combined with the “probably imitative” tag for “ouch” and “ow,” suggests that my brother was, in fact, correct–we don’t have any direct evidence to support this, but some version of “ouch” must have been part of our earliest languages.
That rich and colorful lexicon of other four-letter expressions we use when we hit our thumbs with hammers–well, that’s another story entirely.
* Actually,”d’oh” is a kind of portmanteau, combining the expression of surprise “oh” with the expression of realized stupidity or foolishness “duh.” Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer, also claims he derived the word from an old Laurel and Hardy running gag, when actor James Finlayson would exclaim “Do-o-o-o!”–though, to return to expressions of pain, “Do-o-o-o!” was itself (according to Castellaneta) a substitute for “Damn!” This, according to the OED entry for “d’oh,” which was added to the dictionary in 2001. Just thought I’d mention it in the interest of clarity.
The other day, my writer/rock star friend Ryan Werner sent me a link to an article titled “The 10 Most Harmful Novels for Aspiring Writers.” The gist of the article is that people should stop reading certain books, by certain authors, because those books suck us into pale imitations and lock us out of our own writing. (Or so the premise is. The actual content of the article is more about complaining about certain books and authors — Hemingway, Rand, Kerouac — or trumpeting how successfully the article’s author managed to “break free” of their insidious influence.)
For quick reference, the list is as follows:
Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
Love Story, by Erich Segal
USA, by John Dos Passos
On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
(The “tenth book” isn’t a book but a category, “Good but dangerous,” which includes works by the Brontë sisters, Fitzgerald, García Márquez, Joyce….)
When Ryan posted the article’s link on my Facebook, he added a list of his own:
I’d add The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy, anything by Bukowski, American Psycho, High Fidelity, anything by Carver, the Rabbit books, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and anything by David Foster Wallace. Some of these I’ve experienced personally (Carver, High Fidelity, the Rabbit books) and others I’ve either guessed at or dealt with in workshops, but it’s all dangerous. You were in grad school when people were really into David Foster Wallce. That must have been hell.
When I checked out the article online, I noticed a fantastic comment below the article, from a reader named “AmandaJuneHagarty.” Here’s what she wrote:
I understand your point, but I completely disagree with your conclusion that we should just not read certain books. The key is to read a vast array of books. Every writer practices mimicry at least a little. The wider variety of books the better. Even poorly written books, full of drivel, teach you what not to do when writing a book. The lesson that a young and aspiring writer should be learning is to expand their horizons not limit them. You don’t do them any favors with this article. But I know what you are doing. It’s the oldest trick in the book — a bit cliche I must say. Maximize controversy, maximize exposure. I certainly would never have heard of you if a Facebook friend had not posted a link to your article in disgust. The trouble with this method is you aren’t really maximizing your contribution.
I pasted that comment into my reply to Ryan’s post, and added the following:
I second that motion.
I think the mark of a bad writer isn’t that they imitate or who they imitate, but their inability to transcend that imitation. But all writing is an imitation of something — even life — so reading these books and trying to work through them toward your own voice is a good thing, not a bad thing. The danger isn’t in the book, but in how we’re taught to read them, and how we’re taught to write. And in that respect, I would agree with this guy — too many lit programs and too many writing programs hold up these examples and simply say, “Here — write like this.” [. . .] If only this guy had actually said that.
Later last night, I was reading an article on creative writing pedagogy in AWP‘s Pedagogy Exclusives database, “More than Just Mentorship and Modeling: Creative Writers and Pedagogy,” by Gerry LaFemina. In the article, LaFemina is trying a dual argument for why creative writing and literary critics are not so separate or at odds as they sometimes make each other out to be, and how creative writing teachers might best serve their students while also satisfying the critical expectations of their lit-studies colleagues. But within all that, he makes a few comments that felt applicable to this other discussion I’d been having, about what to read (or not to read) and why.
LaFemina points out that to become fully rounded writers, creative of otherwise,
[s]tudent writers must learn the formal, stylistic, semantic, aesthetic, and aural options for delivery of this information, and as they do, they must make fundamental changes either to the facts of a given event or to the language. They are learning to give up pure self expression for the finding of that voice Kinnell mentions when he suggests how poetry transcends the autobiographical.
He explains how writing teachers can model this skill in our classrooms and in our own lives by sharing with our students our own writing habits, our reading preferences, and the things we learn at writing conferences (an approach I have long used myself — I view modeling and collaborative learning as fundamental to my job as a teacher as well as a writer).
Later, LaFemina suggests that writing teachers can encourage students “to listen to language and take joy in a diversity of styles, modes, and voices. Moreover, the best student writers are the ones who read — and read voraciously.” And it is this last point that seems most relevant. In her comment on the “Harmful Books” article, “AmandaJuneHagarty” (and others) argue that aspiring writers should learn from a variety of sources and should practice a variety of styles. “Every writer practices mimicry at least a little,” she writes. In fact, many successful writers encourage mimicry, especially when offering advice to young or beginning writers. Robin McKinley, for instance, in the FAQ page on her website, tells beginning writers:
You can also learn a lot by sheer plagiarism, so long as you recognise that that is what it is and that it’s only a writing exercise. I wrote an awful lot of very bad Tolkien pastiche when I was younger — I didn’t realise what I was doing at first, but even when I began to, later on, I could see that I was learning a lot about characterisation and plot development, how you get people from one place to another, how much background you need, how to slip in information your story is going to need later, how to lay a good ambush for the innocent reader.
McKinley would probably balk at the “Harmful Books” article (notice that Tolkien is on that list), and she strongly supports broad reading, including the “bad” books: “Read as much as you can and write as much as you can,” she advises new writers. “Reading feeds your own story-telling. [. . .] This includes, by the way, a category I will call Good Trash. (My husband once wrote an essay called In Praise of Rubbish,* on the subject of reading bad books as well as good ones, and he says it’s the most popular and reprinted article he’s ever done.”
Ryan Werner followed up my criticism of that “Harmful Books” article with some criticism of his own: “I’m not saying those books or any of the ones I mentioned shouldn’t be read, and in that respect I also totally disagree that people should avoid these books or even writing in the styles these books are written in. [. . .] Where the danger comes in is exactly where you place it: using the cribbing as the style instead of an influence on the style.”
Which brought to mind an old favorite textbook of mine, which LaFemina also references in his Pedagogy Exclusives article:
Nicholas Delbanco’s textbook, The Sincerest Form, focuses on belletristic methods to teach craft, using samples by “twelve master stylists, from Ernest Hemingway to Jamaica Kincaid,” explaining how these samples work, and asking students to imitate these measures in order to learn technique. Once certain skills are learned, they can be transcended.
This is why the first two principles on my Fourteen Principles for Creative Writers are to explore the possibilities in writing and to write what you want to write. My list of principles later includes edicts about listening to criticism and accepting advice, because writing is about growing — and transcending mere imitation — but it should begin with what we love. And what we love to write should also be what we love to read, in which case, there should be no “rules” or limitations on where our influences come from. All we need is a good writing teacher to help us learn what to do with those influences.
* The essay by McKinley’s husband, Peter Dickinson, is actually titled “In Defense of Rubbish.” You can find a copy of it on his website, which I linked to in the essay’s title.
I’m not a great poet. I give it a go when I can, though, and I have a strong respect for poetry and poets–in fact, I believe that poetry informs fiction in profound ways, that the best prose comes from someone who at least appreciates poetry. So I try to keep my hand in, if only every now and then.
This poem is, as all entries in the Writer’s Notebook, just draft. So be gentle with it. For more on the exercise, through, see below.
I am reminded of my dad’s woolen Boy Scout blanket,
fuzz balling across it like mold, laying lumpy across
the field I see as I rest my prepubescent palm
against the painted gray barrel of this old cannon.
Across this rippled drag of lawn
a row of blue matches, aims at me.
I am eleven, unafraid.
The narrow muzzles—too small for the great
steaming cannonballs I had imagined the whole
car trip here—some history student, some intern
cemented long ago. The boy I am is disappointed;
I long to see one thin muzzle
heavy with iron instead of cement
fire, flame and acrid smoke and hissing ball
spit forth across the blanket field. I want the acid stench,
gunpowder burning, the rebel yell in my ears, blood,
the paint-red blood I’ve seen in films. I have come to see
the history once flat on a textbook page, now aimed
at my face. I will move on—giddy
with my grandparents in their station
wagon, me sprawled in the open back,
staring at the thin lines of the heater in the glass—I will
visit other places. Forests brakish green in North Carolina,
the sinking Washington monument, lost hazy days
through a foggy Tennesee. I will go home to my parents,
to my father of Boy Scout days,
my mother of classroom talk, I will
jabber youthfully about white-splattered statues,
echoing museums, silent cannon barrels. And later, when I am
grown, I will discover why they all—grandparents, mother, father,
cold statues on horses, swords drawn from stone scabbards—
why they all smiled sadly as I described the green blanket
fields in gray mornings and
the long distant line of cannon
blue aimed at me.
The exercise comes from The Poetry Resource Page. They call it “the childhood exercise,” and the gist of it is to write a poem from a childhood memory. The idea is to list everything you can remember about a particular childhood event–no matter how insignificant–and then turn that list into a poem.
A friend of mine from college posted a couple of videos on Facebook, each showing Weird Al Yankovich repairing American society’s poor grammar, and I simply had to share them here. Also, shout out to my mother-in-law, who carries a rainbow of Sharpies (clickable, so she can wield them one-handed!) in her purse in case she needs to beat Weird Al to the punch and correct signage errors herself. She is the scourge of the local Wal-Mart, and I love her for it!
While I’m posting linguistic nerdom, I have to mention that I’ve been binging today on the awesome “Ask the Editor” videos at Merriam-Webster’s website, which in turn have made me nostalgic for one of my favorite programs on NPR, “On Words.”
So far so good, and I’m actually feeling pretty positive about going out tomorrow. The skies are still problematic but some flights are leaving and the situation gets better every hour, so, fingers crossed.
Today, we decided to hit our last museum (or what I hope is our last museum) and head over to the Historich Museum. It’s a positively massive complex, and had we tried it earlier in the trip we probably could have spent the whole day there. Fortunately, the museum itself understands how intimidating such a huge and sprawling collection can be, so they offer a “highlights” tour that guides people through the rooms to the most important/impressive exhibits. I still got sidetracked by other cool exhibits and we wound up seeing a little more than just the “highlights,” but it was a nicely abbreviated tour through Dutch history and an interesting way to recap so much of what we’ve already seen so far.
Afterward, we left the rest of the day open, trying to keep things as relaxed as we can (we’re on the edge of our proverbial seat, ready to leave tomorrow but anxious about the flight situation, so we have to sort of force ourselves into leisure), and we strolled down to the Liedseplein just to see the sights. We’d been through this area a lot in our criss-crossings of the city, and we like the neighborhood quite a lot—it’s heavy on art and antique shops and so a bit out of our price range, but it also has a nice mix of cheap eateries and pleasant cafes, and this is an area where a lot of impromptu street performers like to hang out, so there’s always something to see. Today, we saw a group of trick cyclists performing outside a café, for instance, and we paused on a small canal bridge to watch them. Then we popped into the Little Buddha sushi bar for a late lunch (Jennifer discovered she really likes sushi, and I’m thinking of trying to make it when we get back home) before heading back to our room to pack and wait out the last of our trip to Amsterdam.
9:47 pm
Day 10.END
Friday, April 23, 2010
We’re out! We’re on our way home! At long, long last.
I loved our trip to The Netherlands and this whole travel fiasco has done nothing to dampen those affections or put us off returning some day in the future. Sometimes, when travel seemed its most hopeless, I even looked into what it would take to stay and work in The Netherlands! But we are indescribably relieved to have snapped free of this limbo, like a shuttle escaping gravity, and we’re looking forward to our own home, our own meals, and most of all our cats.
Time: in the air, on the way home…..
Today
Looking back, I find it remarkably easy to separate the stress of waiting and wondering and hassling airlines from the pleasure of wandering the Amsterdam streets, the ease of sitting in cool leafy parks or cobblestoned little squares, the general joy of The Netherlands. While there remains this kind of mental wall dividing Day 10 from Day 10.1, our planned vacation from our forced stagnation, this division is confined solely to the phone calls, the long airport lines, the hours scouring the Internet for alternate travel options. When we retreated from all that hectic stress and went to a park or a museum or a cafe, we were still very much aware of our predicament, but in my memory those moments belong to the pleasant side of the divide, and I will always be glad (and a little proud of us) that we were able to make what we could of a long, nerve-wracking situation.
Still, the best moments remain on the vacation side of the line: I will always cherish the thrill of discovering family history in the Central Bureau of Genealogy in The Hague and the wonder of retracing family origins in Hoorn. I will always recall the thrill of seeing some of the most famous art in world, particularly the the Vermeers, the Van Goghs, the Rembrandts, and the Eschers, in person. I will always think fondly of quiet afternoons in cafes or in the park, the cool breeze cutting through the warm sun. I will forever be grateful to our wonderful B&B host, Irene; our big, comfortable room upstairs felt like a home away from home even before we needed a home away from home, and when we got stranded, she did everything she could to make us feel welcome. And I will try to carry with me the casual hipness of Amsterdam, though I’m sure I’ll never be able to really carry it off.
To borrow a phrase from Chandler Bing: Holland loves the Snoek-Browns, thank you Amsterdam, good-night!
My friend Ryan Werner and I are involved in a work of collaborative fiction, the old Round Robin exercise. I’ll describe the general rules and what we’re up to below, but you probably already know something about this sort of exercise as it is. It’s been my turn to contribute for longer than I can remember, though, and I owe Ryan something, so I thought this week I’d use the Writer’s Notebook to make myself get something done on that story.
In what follows, the italicized text is where Ryan stopped writing, the bolded text is my minor revision of that ending, and the rest is some of what I’ve added.
He swung the shirt around Lawson’s neck and brought his hands towards and then passed each other in a near collision. As he tightened the shirt around Lawson’s throat, Grady was practically carrying him a block down the street to where Cordell’s truck was waiting, passenger side door open, and the second after Lawson blacked out, Grady swiftly guided him to the seat, kicking in his feet and closing the door behind him.
Lawson turned to run but his head whipped forward and he nearly lost his feet as Grady swung the shirt around Lawson’s neck and caught the other end and yanked. He tugged the ends away from each other and twisted, wheeling his arms like he was driving a truck, jerking on the shirt to keep Lawson off his balance, and when he’d formed a leash of the shirt he dragged Lawson down the walk and into the street and further still, hauling him stumbling for a block down the road to where Cordell’s truck was waiting, passenger side door open, and the moment Lawson blacked out, Grady caught him and guided him to the seat, kicking in his feet and closing the door behind him.
***
When Lawson woke he saw light winking at him. He thought perhaps he’d gone blind or had died and this was the stars and the shimmering light of death. But he blinked and his vision came into focus on the tree overhead, the sunlight sprinkling through it. He shifted but couldn’t move. He was hogtied in the bed of a pickup. He groaned.
Afternoon, bud, Grady said. He was leaning with his forearms across the wall of the bed, grinning down at Lawson, a cigarillo in his teeth.
You know what I been thinking about?
Fuck you, Grady.
I been thinking about when we first met. You remember that? You and Leon and Janine, and that other one, that girl of yours. Carly?
Charlene.
Yeah, the four of you just sitting around in your living room getting drunk one night, not a one of you up to anything interesting, and here I come, busting through your door like it was my own. You remember that night?
Let me up, Grady. Untie me, damn it.
I come busting in your house and switching off whatever lights I could find, locking your own door, telling you to hush in your own house. And you just sat there. Old Leon, he had the balls to ask what I was up to, but when I told y’all I’d just outrun a trooper and needed a place to hide, you, bud, you just sat there calm as you please, never said a word.
You said you’d been drinking and speeding a bit and didn’t want to get hassled. We’d all been drinking, I knew how it went. I felt for you.
You felt for me.
I was stupid.
No, son, you were smart. You used to be smart about things like this, about how you ought to deal with me. Now you gone and started thinking. He leaning into the bed and flicked Lawson’s forehead, a hollow thump against the skull. You started opening your mouth. You think you’re smarter than old Grady. But you forgot that night, you forgot why I come into your house in the first place.
You chose me? You came to my house on purpose?
No, bud, I picked the first house that would do. I wasn’t just drunk, I was—running some things—and there weren’t no way in hell I was getting stopped by no trooper. If it’d come to it I’d have killed you all that night if it meant saving my own skin. But you invited me in, you said you understood. And that’s what you got to understand now.
He reached and grabbed the ropes pinning Lawson’s wrists to his ankles, and he jerked them hard. Lawson’s shoulder popped like a knuckle cracking, and he cried out. Grady stepped up on the tire and leaned all the way into the bed, his other hand on the floor to steady him as he put his face into Lawson’s face, the smoke from his cigarillo the only thing between them.
I don’t get caught, son.
Typically, the Round Robin is something like a “first line” exercise, except the line you’re handed isn’t always the first, and it usually comes from a writer you know. The idea is that someone starts a story, writes for a specified period of time or word count (see the FYI below), and then hands the story off to you; you pick up the story where the previous writer left off, write for your specified period or length, and then pass the story on to a third writer. And so on, and so on.
It’s a pretty common exercise–so common, in fact, that most advanced workshops avoid it because they’re sick of doing them–but I still think they can be useful. In my case, I think I’m also jealous of the collaboration possible in other art forms like film or stage, and I love to push writing into other artists’ business.
In the case of this story, Ryan and I are tackling it a little differently than the classic Round Robin. Usually, you’re supposed to be tapping into a freewritten subconscious, just writing from whatever you were handed and seeing where it goes. The upside is that a story can take directions none of the other authors would ever have foreseen, which can keep the writing fresh and challenging all through the exercise. To some extent, Ryan and I are doing that, but we also know each other’s work and style well enough, and respect each other enough as writers, that we’re invading each other’s work as we go. That means when I hand off my story to Ryan, he gets total ownership of everything, my scenes as well as his own, and he gets to revise everything to fit his vision before he adds more text of his own. Then, when he hands the story back to me, I get control over everything and re-revise the piece as well as adding to the end. The writing remains surprising and fascinating, but we’re never beholden to the work and can change the things that frustrate us or take us too far away from the story we had envisioned. Plus, because we are revising as we go, with each new hand-off the story gets tighter, better written, and closer to a final draft. For example, what appears here is rough and quickly written, but rather than Ryan having to offer careful comments on how he might fix my writing, Ryan will get to fix it himself as he sees fit, and I just have to wait until it’s my turn again. And round and round we go.
Our approach really only works when two writers have similar tastes and can respect each other’s work. For this to work, you have to be comfortable with yourself as a writer and be willing to relinquish control of your story even in its drafting stage, which is often difficult to do. But if you ever have a chance to do something like this, I suggest you give it a shot. It can be a cool experience.
(FYI: One of the coolest recent experiments I’ve seen in this form–and the book that led me to take the exercise seriously–is the fun little story-cycle Write Across Canada. In that book, one writer created characters and a situation, set in Newfoundland, and then restricted themselves to 600 words and 48 hours. Then they sent the characters–and the story draft–to the next province over (I forget whether they sent it to Labrador or Prince Edward Island first), where a writer in that province would continue the story. The only rules were that each chapter had to be set in the province it was written in, had to be shorter than 600 words, and had to be written within 48 hours, and then the story would move on to the next province. It’s a little messy sometimes but from a writing perspective, all the more exciting for the mess, and if you can get a copy, you should definitely check it out.)
We spent all last night checking trains and buses, but nothing we could find was getting us anywhere any faster. Our B&B hostess found a train to Istanbul that would take only two days, but some legs of the journey were unavailable for online booking, so we weren’t even sure it would work. We tried Morocco as well, but most of their flights are booked through next week. So, same problem.
Then I saw that our Lufthansa flight — the one we were scheduled for today and which we’d been told had been canceled — was, in fact, leaving for Abu Dhabi. Today. And I almost lost it.
What is most frustrating is that Lufthansa, which at first was taking such good care of us, has gone and mucked everything up. When they finally got permission to start sending out flights, they apparently decided the best way to get people rebooked was erase all their original bookings start from scratch, so despite the fact that we had a booked ticket and had been bumped four times in as many days, we didn’t make the cut for getting out. Which is why we got pushed back a full week before we could get on a plane.
But that’s not the worst part. The Lufthansa ticketing guy explained on the phone that he could book us on the April 26 flight, but Lufthansa could not issue the ticket until I called Etihad and asked them to “process” the ticket, because Etihad was the original airline for our trip out of Frankfurt. This is precisely what I’d been afraid of days ago when Lufthansa first bumped us off the Etihad flight. I asked about it at the time, but they swore it wouldn’t be a problem. No, it’s a problem. What’s more, the guy claimed he couldn’t just contact Etihad and fix the problem (which Lufthansa has caused) himself; he insisted I had to be the one to call.
So today, I called Etihad. I told the woman on the phone that we’d been rebooked through Lufthansa but there was a problem with the Etihad side of things. I mentioned that she needed to “process” the rebooking, but she had no idea what I was talking about. Then she explained what I’ve suspected all along: Lufthansa never should have switched our tickets in the first place. They weren’t allowed to do that and shouldn’t have been able to do it, and as far as the Etihad system was concerned, they never had — as far as Etihad’s records showed, we’d simply missed our flight from Frankfurt to Abu Dhabi.
Which had, in fact, flown out.
But like me, she was willing to blame Lufthansa for the mistake, so she simply reissued our original tickets and booked us on the first available flight out of Amsterdam, just like we’d originally been scheduled to do way back on last Thursday. We are now due to leave this Friday, April 23. Not April 26 or 28, as Lufthansa had told us. But April 23.
So. Finally, progress. We hope. At this point, I don’t know who to trust, but at least we are finally getting answers along with our rebookings.
With that settled and a little bit of hope in our future, we decided to spend the day coping with stress but making the most of our Museumkaart. Thank goodness we bought this thing! When we first decided to get it, we did so because we’d planned to visit enough museums to make up for the cost of the card (and then some), and at some locations — like the Van Gogh Museum — it would allow us to skip the long lines, so it seemed a wise investment. By now we’ve visited enough museums to buy the same card twice more, and we still have places we could visit for free if we wanted to. Aside from our excellent friend/host Irene, the Museumkaart has probably been the biggest reason we’ve managed to remain relatively calm throughout all this mess.
So today we drifted into town to visit FOAM, a photography gallery, and the Allard Pierson antiquities museum. Both were very cool and a terrific way to escape from the stress of travel. The Allard Pierson is absolutely packed with relics from the ancient world, a truly amazing collection given how small the museum is, though that’s probably because it’s attached to the university. The best exhibit, though, was a special multi-room journey through the Egyptian afterlife, and I was proud of how much I remembered from my own studies into the subject for my dissertation novel — at several points I was even able to elaborate on some of the details for Jennifer.
The FOAM was probably the highlight, though. Some of the photography was fairly plain, at least for my tastes, but there was an extensive exhibit by Amsterdamer Ari Maropoulos that was extremely cool. Photos ranging from `80-era New York hip-hop culture and street rappers to skaters from the `90s and 2000s, intimate portraits of his family and friends to professional portraits of celebrities, even a surprising (and surprisingly convincing!) “Self-portrait as Egon Scheile,” after Schiele’s own “Self Portrait With Arm Twisting Above Head.” Marcopoulos’s coolest piece, though, might have been a short film of him and a friend skateboarding down steep and winding streets from a hilltop into town, wearing matching gray suits and passing the camera back and forth between them as they flew along as frightening speeds. That’s all the film showed, really, but it was mesmerizing.
The other interesting exhibit was from Paul Graham, whose exhibit “a shimmer of possibility” shows strikingly mundane scenes (alone, they might even seem boring) but in sequence, in an effort to tell some sort of story. Every art piece, then, consisted not of one photograph but of a series spanning a wall, meant to be seen together. Some worked better than others, but one in particular captivated me, the exquisite “New Orleans (Woman Eating), 2004” series. In the wall plaque describing his work [and in the online video discussing this exhibit], Graham claims to have been influenced by Chekhov, which was another reason I found him so interesting. Coolest of all, Jennifer remarked halfway through his exhibit, “You know, if you wanted to, you could do this. Your pictures are as good as these.” I don’t know if that’s actually true, but I figure at the rate I take pictures (I’ve taken something like 2,000 this trip!), sooner or later some of them are bound to be decent.
For lunch we decided to head over to the Rembrandtplein and try De Kroon, which our guide books raved about for its hip setting and Art Deco design. They’re renovating it (what else is new) so the paint fumes were a bit heady come up the stairs, and the main room was almost deserted when we dropped in, but that turned out to have been fine with us — we sat by an open window overlooking the plein and enjoyed the sun and the breeze as we sipped our coffee.
So all in all, today was just what we needed to unwind.
But we’ll see what tomorrow brings.
11:17 pm
Day 10.6
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
I feel like we’re running a countdown now, and all these things we do to fill up our purgatorial days are just to make the time pass quicker. When we go to a park or a museum, we’re not really going to a park or a museum — we’re just stopping by on our way to the airport. Day after day.
They are nice diversions, though, these little “side trips” of ours. Today we visited the Museum van Loon, a 19th-century canal house preserved in its original stately glory. It belongs to the descendants of one of the founding members of the Dutch East India Company, so the potential for opulence is vast, but actually, the canal house is rather modest both in size and in furnishings, at least, the parts we could see. There were only a handful of bedrooms, for instance, though some of the rooms on the lower floors were being used as museum offices, and we didn’t have access to the servants’ rooms. Most of the flourish and indulgences are in the architecture, actually, such as the carriagehouse windows painted black and detailed with fake curtains to keep the servants there from spying on the back garden, or the bedrooms and corridors being fitted with false doors just to preserve the illusion of symmetry. But the highlight was without a doubt the introductory video, narrated by the late Professor Maurits van Loon. His slow, guided tour through the house, during which he explains his memories visiting his grandparents in the house, are fascinating, but better still are the delightful moments of comedy in which he tells an anecdote about some distant relative or — hilariously — surprising actual visitors to the museum and simply pausing before quietly saying, “Oh — hello!” and moving on. A charming way to begin our day, really.
Afterward we made our way across town to the Tropenmuseum. It was a long hike (we’ve stopped buying transit cards to save money, so we had to walk the whole way there), and the Oosterpark, while offering one pretty little resting spot, was far less cultivated than our beloved Vondelpark, and the day has been fairly windy and overcast, so the walk through the park was quite gray and a bit forbidding. So we were glad to get to the Tropenmuseum, a vast museum documenting the cultures the Dutch encountered as they traded with and/or colonized various cultures around the world, particularly tropical island cultures (hence the name of the museum). It was actually a much larger museum than we’d expected, and while all three levels were absolutely packed with loads of cool interactive multimedia displays, it was almost too much to take in. Plus, the long exhibit on Middle Eastern cultures only reminded us that we need to get home, so by the end of the day we were emotionally as well as physically tired, and now, after another dinner at “home,” we’re ready to tick one more day off the calendar and move closer to home.
10:01 pm
[I can’t help but add this to the post: The Museum van Loon video we watched is available online! I loved this dear old professor so much I have to share him here. Enjoy!]
Ever since this fiasco began, we’d been considering alternate forms of travel, just in case. As Tuesday approaches and the situation in the skies shows little sign of improving, Jennifer decided it might be smart to start planning alternate travel now, just in case our Tuesday flight gets canceled after all. So we’ve been spending a lot of our “spare” time doing just that, investigating trains, buses, and anything else that might get us across Europe and to an airport that’s still allowing flights.
It’s not going to be easy.
Ever since European airlines started cooperating better and offering more, cheaper, and shorter flights between cities, trains have seen a significant slump in business. I remember reading an article about it a few years ago, and the author suggested then that the romantic days of European train travel were numbered. Turns out he was right. Trains have had to compensate for the reduction in passengers by cutting routes and upping prices, which makes the current situation nightmarish for us: Because of the cooperative nature of the EU, European citizens have easier access to cheaper tickets, and for those Europeans stranded in airports, taking a train home is a no-brainer, so the trains have booked up fast. I had thought we might try a train to Istanbul, which I know could fly us easily to UAE, but we’ve discovered that the route that used to be the Orient Express has long ago disbanded, meaning we’d have to take several different trains with multiple changes along the way, and even if we thought we could manage that, trains are booked for more than a week already, meaning we couldn’t even get to Istanbul—or anywhere else—until late next week, at the earliest. Even if we decided that was worth it (if flights get canceled on Tuesday, there’s no telling when we might get out of here on a plane), the cheapest rail fares start at around $700. And we’d still have to try to book a flight—at our expense—once we got to Istanbul. I considered Morocco, too, which is closer and just as likely to get us to UAE, but travel to Morocco and flights out of Morocco are also booked full for days or weeks.
We looked into buses, as well, which are about half the price of train tickets, but those, too, are completely booked, some of them through the middle of May!
Renting a car isn’t even an option, because picking it up in one country and dropping it off in another is either impossible or absurdly expensive (one rental company that would allow us to drive to Istanbul wanted to charge $15,000. Seriously. For the trouble of an international drop-off, they wanted a $14,000 “drop-off fee.” And even then, the rental for our travel dates was “not available”), so that’s off the table. And to be honest, I’m a little relieved—I wasn’t looking forward to two or three days of driving across several borders.
So it looks like we’re staying put and hoping our plane on Tuesday actually takes off. If not, I’m not sure what we’re going to do.
There is good news, though. The German government has allowed Lufthansa a handful of low-level flights, so Lufthansa has been moving empty planes into Frankfurt in preparation for the airspace opening again, meaning if things do open up on Tuesday, they’ll be ready to fly us out without any further delays.
And more good news: Irene, our B&B host (though at this point I’m starting to think of her as our landlady!), realized we’d started re-wearing our vacation clothes, since we hadn’t packed for a delay like this, and she insisted on doing our laundry for us. I can’t begin to express how grateful we are that she’s been looking after us. She’s become something of a friend in all this and is a tremendous source of comfort every time we get bad news about the air situation. We’re not alone in the B&B—a group of very friendly Brits are stuck here, too (they’re booking a train home to the UK, but even they can’t get out for a couple of days), and they seem just as grateful to Irene for all her generous help.
Anyway, with nothing else to do today but wait, we headed out to a movie and then spent the afternoon in Vondelpark, our emotional touchstone. It turned out to be less peaceful than we’d expected—on this gorgeous Sunday, the park was flooded with a sea of people, so many that practically the only green we could make out was in the trees overhead; every square foot of grass was covered in people—but it was a necessary respite. I took along my paper journal and wrote in it as we relaxed by a stream surrounding the heron refuge in the heart of the park, and in the interest of preserving the emotions of the moment, I’m going to transcribe those pages from the journal as I wrote them, in the present tense:
It seems cruel that the days should be so bright and serene. The breeze still brings a chill in the shade, but the skies are almost perfectly clear, just a pale brush of high, thin clouds in the eastern horizon brushed out like powder on glass. The experts assure us the ash is up there, the southeastern edge of the cloud directly overhead, but they also say it’s invisible from the ground. If I believe that cloud is up there, I have to believe it’s invisible, because except for our continued presence in the city, you’d never know anything was wrong. The park is a throng of picnicking families, partying students, bike riders and roller-bladers , girls smoking cigarettes and guys drinking wine in circles on blankets, games of volleyball and Frisbee tossing playful shadows over everyone. For Amsterdam, it is just another gorgeous Sunday in the park. For us, it’s another day of uncertainty, and this weather that should be relaxing is instead perplexing.
It seems strange, too, that we should even be here in the park. Hundreds of people are even now struggling to make camp in Schiphol Airport, thousands more in airports across Europe and around the world. There’s no hint of such discomfort here in the park, yet I know if our flight doesn’t leave on Tuesday, we may join those camping at the airport, or the train station or bus station if we can find alternate transportation. But any route we take would, after Tuesday, require days more of waiting, and we can’t afford to spend money on waiting much longer. Already we’re planning cheaper meals and drinking more water. We chose to come to park today instead of heading to the beach as our host had suggested because the park is free and nearby—we opted to save the money of a train ticket west to the sea.
So many others would view today as vacation, as relaxation. And a week ago, in this very park, it was. Today, it’s all we can do to keep from collapsing in on ourselves with stress. Our cats are well cared for, Jennifer’s classes are covered, my writing can happen anywhere, and Amsterdam is glorious. But home is home, and we’ve long been ready to get there. Relaxation like this is just stagnation, and it’s time for us to move on.
11:45 pm
Day 10.4
Monday, April 19, 2010
This is impossible!
We spent the day at the library, monitoring the news online and otherwise trying to do a little reading [it’s also where I wrote the only immediate post about all this, before we found out what is to follow here], but during a late lunch, we saw updates online that conditions were not good and the countries we’re worried about most, The Netherlands and Germany, were only letting a handful of flights out. Ours was still on the books, but we decided to head home and call Lufthansa just to make sure.
We are screwed.
Our flight tomorrow has indeed been canceled, and according to Lufthansa, the next available flight from Amsterdam is April 28. I asked to skip the flight from Amsterdam to Frankfurt, thinking we could catch a bus or train to Frankfurt, and I got us booked on a flight for April 26. But even that is too long to wait, so now we’re spending the rest of tonight going back to the train and bus schedules. It was impossible a couple of days ago and I can’t see how it’s going to be any better tonight, but we have to do something. Irene is looking up possibilities for us as well, and hopefully by tomorrow morning we’ll have figured something out. We’d better, because I just don’t know what else we can do at this point.
Samuel Snoek-Brown 