February 13, 2012
-
Amsterdam, Netherlands
I was outside for about 45 minutes today (my part time day) and quite frankly I found that enough. In the morning I sat down behind my work laptop in order to continue with some of the outstanding review work, and also to have a quick chat over Skype with my colleague in Cape Town. The main part of the review work could not be done because somehow it was blocked in the system. I remember the days when the year end review was a set of six or seven questions in a Word document that had to get filled out. Nowadays it’s endless questionnaires with rather puzzling questions that take ages to fill out. And when something goes wrong in the system (as happened today) you need to find the people who can fix it with a searchlight. But oh, this sounds very much like Grandpa talking about them good old days, and that’s maybe a bit unfair.
That three quarters of an hour that I did go out, I went to the English Used Books shop on Kloveniersburgwal, just one block away from me. It’s a great store, very old fashioned, with huge cupboards of – yes – English used books. I was looking for a play by Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire. I bought a DVD of Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother) from Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar last weekend and that particular play is quite central in the film. After having read about it on the net, I went out to the bookshop today to see if they had a copy. They didn’t. But they had several Tennessee Williams books so I’ll just keep checking and one day it’ll be there.
It’s not like I don’t have enough to read, as it is. I’m currently reading a book that is probably the most disturbing book I’ve read in my entire life. It was recommended to me by my former colleague Nancy. One day she heard that I had listened to a podcast from The New Yorker magazine, which was the excellent short story The Lottery (written by Shirley Jackson) read by American writer A.M. Homes. Nancy urged me to buy some books by A.M. Homes, specifically This Book Will Save Your Life and The End Of Alice. I bought both during a visit to New York in 2009, and read This Book Will Save Your Life pretty soon after that.
I only started The End Of Alice when I was in Barcelona earlier this year. Without giving away the plot too much it’s the story of a jailed paedophile who is serving a 25 years jail sentence and who is corresponding with a nineteen year old woman, who herself turns out to be paedophile chasing a twelve year old boy. The book is written from the perspective of the older man and that makes it extremely direct. More than a couple of times I nearly put the book away not wanting to read it further. But the story is captivating and excellently written… and the subject is so horrific… that I’ve continued so far. Including reading some fifteen pages today, but that’s about all I can stomach at a time.
Also, when I was outside today, I took some pictures of the quickly disappearing ice. In front of the house, a small section of the canal was kept ice free by dozens of birds for the two weeks that it was very cold. Now the ice is melting rapidly and the birds will soon have all of Amsterdam’s canals to enjoy again. The gull in the above picture was guarding a particular section of the melting ice, while ducks and coots tried to get to some of the food that was apparently locked in the melting ice. And that, basically, was my day.
