Branko’s Weblog

Here’s a scene from Heijermans’ Diamantstad (Diamond City).

It’s winter and Eli has promised his family food. Having exhausted all possibilities of getting a job for the day, he decides to go and catch fish. On his way to the Amstel river he meets a kid he knows, who asks him what he’s up to.

“I’m looking for a hole in the ice for dead fish.”

“What do you want with dead fish,” the shrill voice of the boy asked.

“Eat!” Eleazar said.

“Damn! What is dead fish good for? I would not eat that…”

“If it is cooked well,” Eleazar said to convince him, “you would fight for a bone!”…

“Dead fish—that stinks.—If you think you can fool me, say, you’d better think again!”

Again Eleazar laughed, shaking the brat that was talking like an old man by his neck.

“Dead fish, stewed with a bit of Vinegar, Jan—you would love that, if it were standing warm in front of you on the table.”

Together they walked on, the man and the limping boy, speaking like friends.

“Have you got a net then?” Jan asked, interested.

“When they come floating to the top you just have to grab them.”

“Float to the top? Float to the top? Damn—they get stuck under the ice!”

“If there’s a hole in the ice they look for air—a fish that cannot breathe will suffocate, just like us…”

“Hee!” the kid screamed, laughing brightly in the morning air. “Hee—a fish suffocating in water, ha ha!”

“You don’t believe it?”

“If you believe it,” the little fellow reasoned, limping heavily in the snow, “they have conned you man—and that’s stupid for such a grown-up guy.”

“Thank you dearly,” Eleazar laughed, brightened by the fresh sounds beside him: “but I think there may be one or two in things in life you and I do not know yet. When a fish does like this”—stopping, he mimicked the movement of gills with his jaws: “when a fish lies flapping on the ground, it tries to breathe—get it?”

Jan thought for a second. Then he orated: “Jeez—they would have a life, out of the water. Do you see they tricked you? When you pull them in on a rod they croak like that—well?—well? How is that possible? The air contains more air than water, right?, in which there is not air at all.”

“In water there’s also air,” Eleazar started to explain, but Jan was instantly on his case.

“…Hee! Hee! Air in water! You’d see bubbles come up all the time. If you blow through an old pipe stem in the water, it almost comes out as quickly as it goes in! You’re just full of it. If I were to shove your head under water, you’d drown. And you wouldn’t drown if there was air down there.”

“Thanks for the lesson,” Eleazar said, cornered, yet trying once again: “and still there’s air in the water, and even if there wasn’t air in it, you find all the same things in water as you find in air—really, Jan…”

“Well I’ll be!” the boy blared out: “if water is air, and air is water, then fish would fly and birds would swim!—Man, they can make you believe anything! You should just let them talk!”

“So why will they float up in the winter?” Eleazar laughed again, though with less vigour this time, because my my, if you knew the world from afar, the first street kid to come along would crush you in debate. “Why do fish die by the thousands when the water is closed?”

“Because,” the kid replied immediately, “because they’re dying from cold, just like the granddad from the bottlemaker from across, whom they found frozen in the cellar.”

“No,” Eleazar said: “down in the water it’s warmer when it’s freezing, just like under the ground.”

“You can say so much!”

“Ask teacher at school.”

“We’re not allowed to ask anything at school, only to put up our hands when you need to piss.”

“Well Jan—it’s true just the way I told you.”

“Boy!” the kid mocked: “Boy! They really pulled the wool over your eyes, I am telling you! If it’s not possible, it’s not possible! If I were a fish I would die of cold too, now…”

(This book—in Dutch—is currently being prepared for Project Gutenberg.)

Aletta Jacobs (1854 – 1929) was the first Dutch woman to complete a university education. She had to jump through a number of hoops to get where she got. First she had to get permission to attend classes at a polytechnic. Next she had to get the state’s permission to attend med-school lectures at the university of Groningen, and finally she had to get state permission to take her exams.

After she had finished her education, she became an MD in Amsterdam, where she introduced the diaphragm for birth-control. Contrary to doctors of her time who apparently were prescription engines, she believed in informed patients. Part of getting people to know their own bodies was a well illustrated book she wrote, and that Project Gutenberg recently re-published, called De Vrouw, haar bouw en haar inwendige organen (The woman; her construction and her internal organs). She published it in 1999 so that women could get to know their own bodies better. She felt this was necessary; as she wrote in her introduction:

De schromelijke onbekendheid van velen, zelfs van ontwikkelden, met het kunstig samenstel van hun eigen lichaam heeft mij meermalen getroffen.

Vooral van vrouwen was ik dikwerf getuige van de gebrekkige kennis van het lichaam in het algemeen en van den bouw, de ligging en de verrichting harer geslachtsorganen in het bijzonder.

(I have noted on several occasions that even educated people sometimes don’t know how their own bodies work. Especially women know little about their bodies in general, and little about the way their reproductive organs work.)

As I am wont to do with such books I leafed through this one in the expectation that I would find a heavily self-censored work. I have seen sex-ed texts much younger that would basically boil down to “girls can sleep in, boys need to wake up early so that mother can change their sheets,” and illustrated anatomy books in which the areas that house our reproductive organs were pictured just as blank as central Africa on 19th century maps. But Jacobs, albeit sometimes a bit clinical in tone, did not shy away from discussing sex and reproduction candidly. Her style is looser than you might expect from a 19th-centurier, which makes the book readable even now.

These things alone would have been insufficient for me to spend time discussing this work here if it hadn’t been for a news item I caught on the radio a couple of weeks ago. A hospital in Utrecht had started handing out pills to young muslim women that would help them to simulate bleeding of the hymen on their wedding nights. Apparently there are young men that still believe* that a woman is property, and that an undamaged hymen is a fool proof indicator of virginity. Little do these men know that they themselves are the fools.

But the thing is, no matter how ignorant the argument, you start to make room for it in your mind. You figure that if even today young muslims still think the hymen is an indicator of virginity*, then perhaps our enlightened ideas about female sexuality are relatively new, and they just haven’t reached everybody yet.

Except of course that what we know about the hymen is not so new at all. Jacobs wrote in 1899:

Bij geslachtsgemeenschap of anders bij de eerste baring wordt het hymen vernietigd. Doch ook op andere wijze kan het verloren gaan, zoodat het gemis volstrekt niet aan eerstgenoemde oorzaak behoeft te worden toegeschreven, evenmin als de aanwezigheid een volstrekt bewijs is, dat geen geslachtsgemeenschap plaats greep.

(During sex or otherwise during the first time a woman gives birth the hymen is destroyed. It can however also be lost in other ways, so that a lack of hymen need not be attributed to sex, just like the presence of a hymen is not proof that a women has not had sex.)

*) There is a trap I fell into when I first wrote this, which is that I assumed that the need for such a pill indicates that this is how some young Dutch muslims think. Apparently though it is a tradition in some cultures that the man shows the bloody bed sheet of his wedding night to his parents. The bride may merely be thinking of helping her husband; if the sheet is blood stained, he won’t have to lie to his parents.

There are three major e-book projects that make electronic books available for free to the general public in accessible formats (usually HTML, sometimes “plain text”). One is Project Gutenberg, an American project that does not limit itself to English. I am a volunteer there. The second is Project Laurens Jz Coster, named after the Dutchman who stole Gutenberg’s ideas for movable type in order to claim he had invented movable type himself. The third is the Digitale Bibliotheek Nederlandse Letteren.

The latter claims a copyright on texts that are clearly in the public domain: a wholly despicable practice that is morally equivalent to fraud. If I could avoid linking to them, I would. Unfortunately they are jealousy inducingly active, and also have managed to convince many authors and estates to let them publish books that are indeed still in copyright.

One of these books is Battus’ Opperlandse taal- & letterkunde, the definitive book for playfully documenting the many quirks of the Dutch language. Battus is the pseudonym for Hugo Brandt Corstius, a computer linguist who knows how to write. The DBNL publishes the 2nd edition of 1981.

I’ll explain the differences between the three projects in greater detail in a future post, because all three projects have their own distinctive strengths, which it helps to know when you are looking for a certain Dutch classic.

Via Eamelje.net.

van alle menschen, die oom verachtte en wantrouwde, waren er geen, voor wie die verachting en dat wantrouwen grooter was, dan voor de winderige, laffe, beginsellooze jongelieden van de negentiende eeuw

From “Joachim Polsbroekerwoud” by Vlerk, pseudonym of Bernardus Gewin (1812-1873).

Translation: “because of all the people that uncle hated and mistrusted there were none for whom that distrust and hatred was greater than for the windy, cowardly, principleless youths of the nineteenth century.” And the girls merely wanted to go play with their friends…

The other day the wonderful Louise Hope post-processed a book I had uploaded to the Distributed Proofreaders to be proofread, and did so at a speed us mortals can only dream of. The book is an Arthur Pinero play, The “Mind the Paint” Girl, which had some success on Broadway and in the form of two Hollywood spin-offs.

Part of the play were four lines of a song, to be sung by all the actors on the stage. On my request Louise converted these lines to Lilypond, so that anyone can now reproduce it faithfully to any format they like. So here’s my rendition: sung, in Ogg Vorbis format.

The following is a short biography I wrote about Pinero for the proofreaders:

Biography and About this play

Arthur Wing Pinero (1855 – 1934) was a British playwright, son of Portuguese immigrants. His works have been in the public domain in Life+70 countries since 2005. Project Gutenberg already has a couple of them, and besides The “Mind the paint” girl I have two more (”The Big Drum” and “The Cabinet Minister”); so if you liked this one, tell me, and I will give them scanning priority.

Pinero wrote mostly comedies, of which this is one. When he initially tried to write a tragedy, the public rejected it, and he had to rewrite the play (”The Profligate”). With the popularisation of tragedy through the likes of Ibsen, he tried his hand at this type of play again, and this time with more success. George Bernard Shaw called Pinero “a humble and somewhat belated follower of the novelists of the middle of the nineteenth century”.

The “The ‘Mind the Paint’ Girl” seems to have been successful; it was performed in London, New York (Broadway) and Mainz in the year of its publication. It was filmed twice (in 1916 and 1919), and in his novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922), F. Scott Fitzgerald writes: “His bathroom, in contrast to the rather portentous character of his bedroom, was gay, bright, extremely habitable and even faintly facetious. Framed around the walls were photographs of four celebrated thespian beauties of the day: Julia Sanderson as ‘The Sunshine Girl,’ Ina Claire as ‘The Quaker Girl,’ Billie Burke as ‘The Mind-the-Paint Girl,’ and Hazel Dawn as ‘The Pink Lady.’”

Richard Carrier writes about the books recovered from the lava-covered town of Herculanaeum, and this sentence that he came across in one of them:

For example, consider the man in Alexandria who was a foot tall, with a colossal head that could be beaten with a hammer, who used to be exhibited by the embalmers.

(Via Brian Flemming.)

Today’s harvest: 5 kg of books (5 copies for PG, to the left, and 15 for myself). I spent about 4 or 5 euros. Weight: 5 kg. About five were free.

Later some friends came by and we went out dumpster diving. I think I got 5 or 6 more books, although I am afraid to touch them for now.

See here for last year.

The editors of the 1865 word list of the Dutch language strike a blow for linguistic tolerance. (The rest in Dutch.) De redactie van het “Groene Boekje” uit 1865, de “Woordenlijst voor de spelling der Nederlandsche Taal” van De Vries en Te Winkel, konden het niet nalaten om bij de bespreking van leenwoorden even uit te halen naar sommige al te intolerante landgenoten:

Ook in het opnemen der meest gebruikelijke bastaardwoorden moesten wij met eenige ruimte te werk gaan, om de toepassing der beginselen, die wij in dit deel der spelling hebben aangenomen, in de bijzonderheden te doen kennen. Men zal daaruit bespeuren, dat wij de rechten der gastvrijheid milder en onbekrompener opvatten dan sommige sprekers op het Rotterdamsche Congres hebben gedaan; dat wij de vreemdelingen, die geen misbruik maken van ons vertrouwen, volgaarne in ons midden toelaten; hen geheel als burgers erkennen, zoodra zij getoond hebben dit te begeeren; maar hen ook, in het tegenovergestelde geval, vrijlaten zich te vertoonen in hunne nationale kleederdracht, die hun zoo goed staat, in plaats van hun, ongastvrij en onwellevend, een Nederlandsch gewaad op te dringen, dat niet voor hunne leden geschapen is.

(Deze woordenlijst kan over enige tijd op Project Gutenberg verwacht worden. Mogelijk heeft de DBNL er al eentje.)

(The following was translated from German to Dutch by someone else, and from Dutch to English by me. It may have lost something in the translation. There’s also a horrible mixed metaphore in there that I somehow totally failed to manage to steer around.)

[...] Which of these is the most perfect, the best, the highest, truest, purest, the absolute religion? And should we hope that this one will conquer and usurp all other religions in the end to become the true world religion, so that there will be one shepherd, and one flock? We already know, every higher religion claims to be the only true one, and also believes — if any thought is given to it at all — in its own immortality and conquest, and in its calling to become the world religion. Only the tragedy of the Germanic-Scandivian mythology mentioned the “twilight of the gods,” and only in sensing its impending doom at the hand of Christ’s cross.

What is true of these thoughts and expectations? I am not a prophet. But I think that when we have to understand “l’Irréligion de l’Avenir” to mean that mankind, or at least the developed part of it, will no longer have religion, then I cannot share that belief. The longing for the eternal with all the idealistic feelings it produces will always exist, because it belongs to man’s psychological inventory, and a progressing culture cannot change that. [...] For a time it looked like religion could only be something for the uncivilized, good enough for the common people, whereas we the civilized would wean ourselves entirely from it. It seems however that in our time the opposite is taking place, and that — parodoxically as it may sound — religion runs the danger of being repressed by the masses, and having to find refuge among those who know that religion as an expression of higher ideals is something deeper and more delicate than being a true believer and being a fulfiller of church duties. [...] Religion is endangered! they yell, while in reality it is merely this or that sect or formula that is being attacked or that turns out to be out of date. [...] It cannot be assumed that one of the currently existing religions will eat all the others and remain as the one true world religion.

(Theobald Ziegler, 1918)