vrijdag 29 juni 2012
woensdag 27 juni 2012
De E-reader
Via de openbare bibliotheek te E. is het mogelijk om kennis te maken met de E-reader. Je moet dit ding echter wel reserveren. Het is wekenlang wachten totdat je dan eindelijk bericht krijgt dat je de reader kunt ophalen. Het ding is zo populair dat de leentermijn is teruggebracht van 3 weken naar één week.
Vandaag was het eindelijk zover. Ik had bericht gekregen dat de reader voor mij klaar lag. Met een blij gezicht heb ik mij aan de balie gemeld en kreeg het apparaatje mee.
Ik vroeg heel vriendelijk aan de bibliotheekmedewerkster hoe ik nu boeken moest lenen. "Dat gaat momenteel niet mijnheer. Ze zijn allemaal uitgeleend!"
Vandaag was het eindelijk zover. Ik had bericht gekregen dat de reader voor mij klaar lag. Met een blij gezicht heb ik mij aan de balie gemeld en kreeg het apparaatje mee.
Ik vroeg heel vriendelijk aan de bibliotheekmedewerkster hoe ik nu boeken moest lenen. "Dat gaat momenteel niet mijnheer. Ze zijn allemaal uitgeleend!"
donderdag 21 juni 2012
Oh wat is het fijn om een ritueel geslachte koe te zijn.
Er is een convenant voor ritueel slachten; een verbod nog niet mogelijk.
(De foto is uit de NRC van 20 juni)
(De foto is uit de NRC van 20 juni)
De sluiting van de bibliotheek en andere linkse hobbies
Nu de plannen van det demissionaire kabinet of dreigen door
te gaan of het misschien net niet gaan halen wordt langzaam voor iedereen
duidelijk dat de combinatie CDA, VVD en PVV meer ellende heeft veroorzaakt
binnen de culturele sector dan voor mogelijk wordt gehouden.
Alles wat met cultuur te maken heeft zijn volgens hen linkse
elite speeltjes die zo snel mogelijk moeten worden afgepakt.
DAT IS OOK UW SCHULD!! Want u kiezer heeft op deze partijen
gestemd.
Wat is dan wel cultuur volgens deze drie partijen? Wel
datgene dat met "das natürliche Volksempfinden zu tun hat". Excuseer
mij voor deze Duitse regel die zijn oorsprong zo'n 70 jaar geleden kent maar
dat komt vanzelf naar boven als de letters PVV door mijn gedachten stromen.
Wat is dat "Volksempfinden" dan volgens deze
partijen? Wat is cultuur? Dat zijn o.a. die oranje vlaggetjes, vaandels,
wimpels en oranje uitdossing. Het nationale gevoel over een voetbalteam waartoe
alles moet wijken. Alles voor het volk!!
De NRC van gisteren, 20 juni, heeft een groot artikel over
de bezuinigingen op de cultuursubsidies. Dit wordt vandaag in de kamer
besproken. Buiten de Randstad dreigt een ramp.
De kaalslag gaat nog verder, ook bibliotheken behoren tot de
linkse elite, volgens de eerder genoemde politici, en moeten dus verdwijnen. Wie leest er
nog? Waarom zou je kinderen laten lezen? Literatuur is voor de bovenlaag, weg
ermee!!
In de New York Review of Books een pleidooi voor
bibliotheken. In het Engels, zal voor de genoemde politici ook wel te moeilijk
zijn! Waarschijnlijk voor hun literatuurlijst niet in een vreemde taal hoeven
lezen.
The North West London Blues
Zadie Smith
Last time I
was in Willesden Green I took my daughter to visit my mother. The sun was out.
We wandered down Brondesbury Park towards the high road. The “French Market”
was on, which is a slightly improbable market of French things sold in the
concrete space between the pretty turreted remnants of Willesden Library (1894)
and the brutal red brick beached cruise ship known as Willesden Green Library
Centre (1989), a substantial local landmark that racks up nearly five hundred
thousand visits a year. We walked in the sun down the urban street to the
concrete space—to market. This wasn’t like walking a shady country lane in a
quaint market town ending up in a perfectly preserved eighteenth-century
square. It was not even like going to one of these Farmer’s Markets that have
sprung up all over London at the crossroads where personal wealth meets a
strong interest in artisanal cheeses.
But it was
still very nice. Willesden French Market sells cheap bags. It sells CDs of old
time jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. It sells umbrellas and artificial flowers. It
sells ornaments and knick-knacks and doo dahs, which are not always obviously
French in theme or nature. It sells water pistols. It sells French breads and
pastries for not much more than you’d pay for the baked goods in Gregg’s down
Kilburn High Road. It sells cheese, but of the decently priced and easily
recognizable kind—brie, goat’s, blue—as if the market has traveled unchanged
across the channel from some run-down urban suburb of Paris. Which it may have
done for all I know.
The key
thing about Willesden’s French Market is that it accentuates and celebrates
this concrete space in front of Willesden Green Library Centre, which is at all
times a meeting place, though never quite so much as it is on market day. Everybody’s
just standing around, talking, buying or not buying cheese, as the mood takes
them. It’s really pleasant. You could almost forget Willesden High Road was ten
yards away. This matters. When you’re standing in the market you’re not going
to work, you’re not going to school, you’re not waiting for a bus. You’re not
heading for the tube or shopping for necessities. You’re not on the high road
where all these activities take place. You’re just a little bit off it, hanging
out, in an open air urban area, which is what these urban high streets have
specifically evolved to stop people doing.
Everybody
knows that if people hang around for any length of time in an urban area
without purpose they are likely to become “anti-social.” And indeed there were
four homeless drunks sitting on one of the library’s strange architectural
protrusions, drinking Special Brew. Perhaps in a village they would be sitting
under a tree, or have already been driven from the area by a farmer with a
pitchfork. I do not claim to know what happens in villages. But here in
Willesden they were sat on their ledge and the rest of us were congregating for
no useful purpose in the unlovely concrete space, simply standing around in the
sunshine, like some kind of community. From this vantage point we could look
ahead to the turrets, or left to the Victorian police station (1865), or right
to the half-ghostly façade of the Spotted Dog (1893).
We could
have a minimal sense of continuity with what came before. Not so much as the
people of Hampstead must have, to be sure, or the folk who live in pretty
market towns all over the country, but here and there in Willesden the past
lingers on. We’re glad that it does. Which is not to say that we are overly
nostalgic about architecture (look at the library!) but we find it pleasant to
remember that we have as much right to a local history as anyone, even if many
of us arrived here only recently and from every corner of the globe.
On market
day we permit ourselves the feeling that our neighborhood, for all its catholic
mix of people and architecture, remains a place of some beauty that deserves
minimal preservation and care. It’s a nice day out, is my point. Still, there’s
only so long a toddler will stand around watching her grandmother greet all the
many people in Willesden her grandmother knows. My daughter and I took a turn.
You can’t really take a turn in the high road so we went backwards, into the
library centre. Necessarily backward in time, though I didn’t—couldn’t—bore my
daughter with my memories: she is still young and below nostalgia’s reach. Instead
I will bore you. Studied in there, at that desk. Met a boy over there, where
the phone boxes used to be. Went, with school friends, in there, to see The
Piano and Schindler’s List (cinema now defunct) and afterward we went in there,
for coffee (café now defunct) and had an actual argument about art, an early
inkling that there might be a difference between a film with good intentions
and a good film.
Meanwhile
my daughter is running madly through the centre’s esplanade, with another
toddler who has the same idea. And then she reverses direction and heads
straight for Willesden Green Book Shop, an independent shop that rents space
from the council and provides—no matter what Brent Council, the local
government for the London borough of Brent, may claim—an essential local
service. It is run by Helen. Helen is an essential local person. I would
characterize her essentialness in the following way: “Giving the people what
they didn’t know they wanted.” Important category. Different from the concept
popularized by Mr Murdoch: giving the people what they want. Everyone is by now
familiar with the Dirty Digger’s version of the social good—we’ve had thirty
years of it. Helen’s version is different and necessarily perpetrated on a far
smaller scale.
Helen gives
the people of Willesden what they didn’t know they wanted. Smart books, strange
books, books about the country they came from, or the one that they’re in. Children’s
books with children in them that look at least a bit like the children who are
reading them. Radical books. Classical books. Weird books. Popular books. She
reads a lot, she has recommendations. Hopefully, you have a Helen in a bookshop
near you and so understand what I’m talking about. In 1999 I didn’t know I
wanted to read David Mitchell until Helen pointed me to Ghostwritten. And I
have a strong memory of buying a book by Sartre here, because it was on the
shelf and I saw it. I don’t know how I could have known I wanted Sartre without
seeing it on that shelf—that is, without Helen putting it there. Years later, I
had my book launch in this bookshop and when it got too full, mainly with local
friends of my mother, we all walked up the road to her flat and carried on over
there.
And it was
while getting very nostalgic about all this sort of thing with Helen, and
wondering about the possibility of having another launch in the same spot, that
I first heard of the council’s intention to demolish the library centre along
with the bookshop and the nineteenth-century turrets and the concrete space and
the ledge on which the four drunks sat. To be replaced with private luxury
flats, a greatly reduced library, “retail space” and no bookshop. (Steve, the
owner, could not afford the commercial rise in rent. The same thing happened to
his Kilburn Bookshop, which closed recently after thirty years.) My mum
wandered in, with some cheese. The three of us lamented this change and the
cultural vandalism we felt it represented. Or, if you take the opposite view,
we stood around pointlessly, like the Luddite, fiscally ignorant liberals we
are, complaining about the inevitable.
A few days
later I got back on a plane to New York, where I teach for a part of each year.
Logically it should be easier, when a person is far away from home, to take bad
news from home on the chin, but anyone who has spent time in a community of
ex-pats knows the exact opposite is true: no-one could be more infuriated by
events in Rome than the Italian kid serving your cappuccino on Broadway. Without
the balancing context of everyday life all you have is the news, and news by
its nature is generally bad. Quickly you become hysterical. Consequently I
can’t tell whether the news coming out of my home is really as bad as it
appears to be, or whether objects perceived from three thousand miles away are
subject to exaggerations of size and color. Did a Labour-run council really
send heavies into Kensal Rise Library, in a dawn raid, to strip the place of
books and Mark Twain’s wall plaque? Are the people of Willesden Green seriously
to lose their bookshop, be offered a smaller library (for use by more patrons
from other libraries Brent has closed), an ugly block of luxury flats— and told
that this is “culture?” Yes. That’s all really happening. With minimal
consultation, with bully-boy tactics, secrecy and a little outright deceit. No
doubt Councillor Mo Butt (the council has closed) finds himself in a difficult
position: the percentage cuts in Brent are among the highest in the country,
mandated by central government. But the chronic mismanagement of finances is
easily traced back to the previous Labour government, and so round and round
goes the baton of blame. The Willesden Green plan as it stands so obviously
gives the developers an extremely profitable land deal—while exempting them
from the need to build social housing—that you feel a bit like a child pointing
out. In this economy who but a child would expect anything else?
Reading
these intensely local stories alongside the national story creates another
effect that may be only another kind of optical illusion: mirroring. For here
in the Leveson Inquiry into the “ethics of the British press” you find all the
same traits displayed, only writ large. Minimal consultation, bully-boy
tactics, secrecy, outright deceit. Are some of the largest decisions of British
political life really being made at the private dinner tables of a tiny elite? Why
is Jeremy Hunt, the secretary of state “for culture, Olympics, media, and
sport,” texting Murdoch? What did Rebekah promise the Prime Minister and the
Prime Minister promise Rebekah in that pretty little market town of Chipping
Norton? During another period of ex-pat existence, in Italy, I sat at a Roman
café table in a Renaissance square rolling my eyes at the soap opera of Italian
political life: wire-tapped politicians and footballers and TV stars, backroom
media deals, glaring conflicts of interest, tabloid culture run riot,
politicians in the pockets of newspapers. I used to chuckle over la Repubblica
and tease my Italian friends about the kind of problems we didn’t have in our
basically sound British parliamentary democracy.
And so I
recognize myself to be an intensely naïve person. Most novelists are, despite
frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight. And I retain a particular
naivety concerning the British state, which must seem comical to many people,
particularly younger people. I can only really account for it by reaching back
again, briefly, into the past. It’s a short story about debt—because I owe the
state, quite a lot. Some people owe everything they have to the bank accounts
of their parents. I owe the state. Put simply, the state educated me, fixed my
leg when it was broken, and gave me a grant that enabled me to go to
university. It fixed my teeth (a bit) and found housing for my veteran father
in his dotage. When my youngest brother was run over by a truck it saved his
life and in particular his crushed right hand, a procedure that took half a
year, and which would, on the open market—so a doctor told me at the time—have
cost a million pounds. Those were the big things, but there were also plenty of
little ones: my subsidized sports centre and my doctor’s office, my school
music lessons paid for with pennies, my university fees. My NHS glasses aged 9.
My NHS baby aged 33. And my local library. To steal another writer’s title:
England made me. It has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I
understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable,
debt.
Things
change. I don’t need the state now as I once did; and the state is not what it
once was. It is complicit in this new, shared global reality in which states
deregulate to privatize gain and re-regulate to nationalize loss. A process
begun with verve by a Labour government is presently being perfected by
Cameron’s Tory-Lib Dem coalition. The charming tale of benign state
intervention described above is now relegated to the land of fairy tales: not
just naïve but actually fantastic. Having one’s own history so suddenly and
abruptly made unreal is an experience of a whole generation of British people,
who must now wander around like so many ancient mariners boring foreigners
about how they went to university for free and could once find a National
Health dentist on their high street. I bore myself telling these stories. And
the thing that is most boring about defending libraries is the imputation that
an argument in defense of libraries is necessarily a social-liberal argument. It’s
only recently that I had any idea that how a person felt about libraries—not
schools or hospitals, libraries—could even represent an ideological split. I
thought a library was one of the few sites where the urge to conserve and the
desire to improve—twin poles of our political mind—were easily and naturally
united. Besides, what kind of liberal has no party left to vote for, and feels
not so much gratitude to the state as antipathy and, at times, fear?
The closest
I can find myself to an allegiance or a political imperative these days is the
one expressed by that old social democrat Tony Judt: “We need to learn to think
the state again.” First and foremost I need to become less naïve. The money is
gone, and the conditions Judt’s generation inherited and my generation
inherited from Judt’s are unlikely to be replicated in my lifetime, if ever
again. That’s the bad news from home. Politically all a social liberal has left
is the ability to remind herself that fatalism is only another kind of trap,
and there is more than one way to be naïve. Judt again: “We have freed
ourselves of the mid-twentieth century assumption—never universal but certainly
widespread—that the state is likely to be the best solution to any given
problem. We now need to liberate ourselves from the opposite notion: that the
state is—by definition and always—the worst possible option.”
What kind
of a problem is a library? It’s clear that for many people it is not a problem
at all, only a kind of obsolescence. At the extreme pole of this view is the
technocrat’s total faith: with every book in the world online, what need could
there be for the physical reality? This kind of argument thinks of the library
as a function rather than a plurality of individual spaces. But each library is
a different kind of problem and “the Internet” is no more a solution for all of
them than it is their universal death knell. Each morning I struggle to find a
seat in the packed university library in which I write this, despite the fact
every single student in here could be at home in front of their macbook
browsing Google Books. And Kilburn Library—also run by Brent Council but
situated, despite its name, in affluent Queen’s Park—is not only thriving but
closed for refurbishment. Kensal Rise is being closed not because it is
unpopular but because it is unprofitable, this despite the fact that the
friends of Kensal Rise library are willing to run their library themselves (if
All Souls College, Oxford, which owns the library, will let them.) Meanwhile it
is hard not to conclude that Willesden Green is being mutilated not least
because the members of the council see the opportunity for a sweet real estate
deal.
All
libraries have a different character and setting. Some are primarily for
children or primarily for students, or the general public, primarily full of
books or microfilms or digitized material or with a café in the basement or a
market out front. Libraries are not failing “because they are libraries.” Neglected
libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close
them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library
offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do
not have to buy anything in order to stay.
In the
modern state there are very few sites where this is possible. The only others
that come readily to my mind require belief in an omnipotent creator as a
condition for membership. It would seem the most obvious thing in the world to
say that the reason why the market is not an efficient solution to libraries is
because the market has no use for a library. But it seems we need, right now,
to keep re-stating the obvious. There aren’t many institutions left that fit so
precisely Keynes’s definition of things that no one else but the state is
willing to take on. Nor can the experience of library life be recreated online.
It’s not just a matter of free books. A library is a different kind of social
reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a
system of values beyond the fiscal.
I don’t
think the argument in favor of libraries is especially ideological or ethical. I
would even agree with those who say it’s not especially logical. I think for
most people it’s emotional. Not logos or ethos but pathos. This is not a
denigration: emotion also has a place in public policy. We’re humans, not
robots. The people protesting the closing of Kensal Rise Library love that
library. They were open to any solution on the left or on the right if it meant
keeping their library open. They were ready to Big Society the hell out of that
place. A library is one of those social goods that matter to people of many
different political attitudes. All that the friends of Kensal Rise and
Willesden Library and similar services throughout the country are saying is:
these places are important to us. We get that money is tight, we understand
that there is a hierarchy of needs, and that the French Market or a Mark Twain
plaque are not hospital beds and classroom size. But they are still a
significant part of our social reality, the only thing left on the high street
that doesn’t want either your soul or your wallet.
If the
losses of private companies are to be socialized within already struggling
communities the very least we can do is listen to people when they try to tell
us where in the hierarchy of their needs things like public space, access to
culture, and preservation of environment lie. “But I never use the damn
things!” says Mr. Notmytaxes, under the line. Sir, I believe you. However.
British libraries received over 300 million visits last year, and this despite
the common neglect of the various councils that oversee them. In North West
London people are even willing to form human chains in front of them. People
have taken to writing long pieces in newspapers to “defend” them. Just saying
the same thing over and over again. Defend our libraries. We like libraries.
Can we keep our libraries? We need to talk about libraries. Pleading, like
children. Is that really where we are?
Juni 2012:
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jun/02/north-west-london-blues/
zondag 10 juni 2012
Gezocht vrijwilligers die een bijdrage willen en kunnen leveren
De afdelingen Urologie van diverse ziekenhuizen starten op 8 juni 2012 een onderzoek naar de gemiddelde penislengte in Nederland.
Men heeft hiervoor alle mannen in 3 categorieën ingedeeld:
1. Normale range in lengte (> 15 cm. in erectie toestand)
2. Korter dan 15 cm (in erectie toestand)
3. Korter dan 10 cm. (in erectie toestand)
Omdat het voor veel mannen moeilijk is om er voor uit te komen dat de lengte van hun penis onder het gemiddelde is, heeft men een tekort aan deelnemers bij het onderzoek. Men doet daarom nu de volgende oproep om mannen actief te kunnen benaderen voor deelname aan dit belangrijke onderzoek.
Willen alle mannen met een penislengte van minder dan 15 cm. (in erectie toestand), de komende weken rondrijden met één oranje vlaggetje aan hun auto.
En willen alle mannen met een penislengte van minder dan 10 cm. (in erectie toestand), de komende weken rondrijden met twee oranje vlaggetjes aan hun auto.
Mannen die helemaal geen erectie kunnen krijgen kunnen dat kenbaar maken door oranje vlaggetjes aan hun woning te hangen.
Mannen zonder testikels kunnen ook meedoen, zij kunnen dit tonen door hun buitenspiegels met vlaggetjes af te dekken.
Alvast heel hartelijk dank voor deelname aan dit onderzoek!
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