June 1, Seoul
Alexievich’ Voices from Chernobyl. How long could one live on salami and vodka? Maybe not the exact ingredients I would pick, but the idea of a life’s diet so simple, it sounds appealing. To live in a remote place for a while. Tea, coffee, bread, salami. I’m reminded of Dans les Forêts de Sibérie, a memoir in which the author Sylvain Tesson measures the coming and going of winter along the borders of Lake Baikal by tossing a bottle of wodka in the garden as the first snow falls. Winter ends the moment the bottle returns to visibility.
Side thought, why are appealing and appalling so similar and yet so different?
The coffee at Cafe Achalay is average at best, but the little wooden bench outside is sufficient reason for a detour. Away from large roads, slap-down amidst an urban living area, on the long side of a T-shaped street connection, one can stare over the edges of a book or a cup of coffee into the distance. The long street stretches perfectly straight, maybe half a kilometer, all the way towards Wangsimni Station. Today is blue again with fluffy, large, but single clouds, bright and visible through the web of electricity cables so common in an average Seoul street. A copy of the electricity grid atop the bumper car attraction we would frequent every last week of August in my Abcoude days.
We watched Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. It’s strange how much I’ve come to enjoy science fiction as I used to despise it as a kid. Villeneuve finds angles to the genre that draw me in every time. Also, Ryan Gosling. A good actor. I have a tendency to discard the possibility of male Hollywood actors who are popular with the female, usually younger crowds, to be good at their craft as well. It took me several movies to realise Leonardo di Caprio is a good one too.
In an hour or so Inyoung and I will meet for lunch, she’s off on errands all day today and I will go to the graduation party of the North Korean English-learners in the afternoon. It’s sunny and may be a few degrees over total comfort but I plan to walk to the venue and back. One of my preferred coffee places is in the same area, I hope there’s a little time spare for a good cuppa and a few final voices from the nuclear hell. Tomorrow I’ll meet my friend Chris for a little afternoon roadtrip to the island of Ganghwa-do, an hour or so west from Seoul. He’s got some video work to do there, I’m simply tagging along without responsibilities. The best if you ask me. There’s the inevitable homework task to be done, a list of vocabulary needs cramming into the grey mass upstairs. A few hours with the better half on the sofa tonight and there’s the weekend done. And oh, the Champions League final. Not sure if you intend to watch, but if so, please watch for two. It’s a 4 am starting whistle on this side of the planet and this old guy prefers his beauty sleep over what promises to be a fairly one-sided match. I’m sure the Germans have good intentions but I don’t see how they can beat the perfectly spotless white. They may surprise, yes, but if they do, I bet the game will be tediously boring to watch. Ah, what do I know anyway.
Smells of food drifting up from one of the neighbouring houses now. I need to eat too, yes. Inyoung’s awaiting me in 15 minutes, time to get ready and leave. Wishing you a pleasant weekend!
June 1st, Utrecht
A pit stop at the central library, on my way to Panbos, about a further twenty minute cycle if I’m pretending I’m doing Le Tour, where I’m having one of those cravings for running in the woods, and if I count the cycling as a few kms, we can call it 15 kms. It’s Pride today and the city is colorful and packed, lound and festive, drunk and horny. For these reasons, I imagine the woods will offer even more respite. Fosse is affecting (appealing/appaling, that’s one thing, what about affect/effect? This aspiring writer still breaks a sweat, not knowing for certain when to use one or the other) me intensley, there’s some desire for stillness and aloneness. Even though the main character is damaged in ways I hope I’ll never have to face, I still have some desire to be like him? Maybe it’s the painting, the fact that his vocation was discovered early on, and for better or worse under his circumstances it was essential for him to paint, there wasn’t a question of livelyhood, or at least very little of one. The book even makes me long for Canada, where the environment is the same. The lakes, the forests, the cold, the little towns. It all sounds appealing, but then is it full of wounded Ales’?
I’m going to try not to watch the UCL in what feels like an act of defiance. The plan is to arrive after the run, do the nightly dinner / cleaning routine and then maybe try to convice Fatima to watch a documentary: Dutch Light, about the ways that reclaiming the land in the Netherlands affected (Fuck) the light in the Netherlands and thus the great painters. Notice, the link to Ales again. Actually I only heard of this movie through a podcast (CWT), the interviewee is a Pulitzer Prize winner living in Utrecht. Wasn’t that interesting of an interview and the guy seemed a little weird, but the trailer was enticing enough. There’ll be groans coming from Fatima, something like, fuck, not again with this weird boring shit – even if I manage to surpass that hurdle using a twenty minute massage as lure, you can be sure she won’t make it past the thirty minute mark, which will be my cue to start my own ten minute countdown before I’m out. If luck should have it, I’ll awake and head downstairs to toot the horn, and then, maybe then I’ll stream the game, habibi, with Arabian commentary. But I’d rather not, I hope as an artist Fatima appreciates the movie and it’s as interesting as the guy made it out to be.
There’s still about two hundred pages of Fosse to go, at my current pace this’ll last me for two weeks, and then I’m already contemplating what would be next. There’s a temptation to read Geert Mak – have you read him? He’s written a follow-up to In Europe, twenty years later, where he examines the European project in the first twenty years of this century. Sounds dry, but he’s very much on the ground, travelling around himself, reading, interviewing real people, writing, basically living the life I’d like to live, and well that does sound a whole lot better than Ales’.
A Sunday. Seoul
Yes, I read a few things by Mak and have one or two titles that I still like to read, but hey, where’s the time to do all that. The pile of unread books. Not sure if all his work is translated, but the book Hoe God verdween uit Jorwerd is a beautiful piece of Dutch village history. In Europe was made into a tv-series that was really popular at the time. An episode every Sunday evening. That connected spirit of a crowd of people watching the same thing at the same time. A thing we were all unaware of at the time. Walking the nightly streets of Abcoude peaking through people’s windows to see which show they’re watching. Defining a class system based on ‘watches game shows’ and ‘watches the news’. Mostly green screens tonight? Everyone watching the game.
I had never heard of the concept of Dutch light, and neither of the film. I’d like to see it too. It’s fascinating that so many people the world around know of Dutch painters. Ask them to point out the Netherlands on a map, to say something about current day Holland, and their eyes become watery, shoulders start shrugging, uncomfortable giggles, but yeah, that one guy who painted the A2-sized landscape image or a bouquet of sunflowers centuries ago, no problem. Not particularly part of the group that is Dutch Masters but Vincent van Gogh is incredibly popular in Korea. You find reproduction of his paintings everywhere, mural paintings, merchandise, digital fusion reproductions. That’s weird too though. The person Vincent would never be appreciated in Korean society; for his weirdness, his substance abuse, his distancing from society, his self-harm, but oh my, the sunflowers and the starry night.
It’s a long ride, two hours, it may not be for watching with others, but I think you may appreciate it. I watched the ’94 documentary Crumb last night. A fascinating thing. You can find it online easily. About the comic artist Robert Crumb. And his brothers, his wife, and a few other family members. These are some creative but seriously troubled people. Seriously sexually troubled people. We’re thirty years into our march towards a more safe and inclusive society, I’m sure watching this back in the nineties it would have been a different experience than today, but the continuous cringe that hung around me the whole two hours, tells me this wasn’t all right back then either. It’s a collection of conversations with the artist, he’s sketching, he’s talking to one of his brothers or his wife, there’s a plate of spaghetti with chunks of butter for dinner, and there’s nineties nerd fashion too. His glasses fascinate me, thick round glasses, perfect for his face. And the over-belly-button waistband. A little creepy laughter. Disturbing images with porn models, he’s already a famous artist by then. Finishing the film late last night, it left me wondering for a while. Wondering what David Foster Wallace would have thought of the artist Robert Crumb.
We were a group of 80 or so people yesterday afternoon. Half of them North Korean defectors, the other half the group of people who helped said defectors for the past few months with their English learning. Most native English speakers of course, but it’s not an official educational program, so there are a few more like me; a Swede, a French, a Dutch. It’s a thing I happily do, it’s as much learning for me as it is for them. Yesterday too. There’s half the group of people raised in freedom and then there’s the other half of which we are all aware they carry an invisible backpack stuffed with stories of a past filled with anecdotes and experiences the ‘free half’ have a hard time imagining. I don’t want to dramatise things, we’re all aware of the existence and impact of North Korea, but as is so often the case, when the stories become personal and individual, that’s when it hits. It was a graduation party and as part of the graduation several students had prepared a little speech. Some about flowers, sweet dogs and morning sunshine, and others about constant fear and a flight to freedom. Hearing their stories I struggle to make sense of the status-quo that so called important people have built since ’53 and are still actively maintaining. We’re often told about the threat of the regime and it’s not for me to downplay that, although I think we are heavily overdoing it in favour of news article sales and consumption of stories of fear, but most importantly, we forget that there are 25-odd million people still living in the poorest of conditions. People we see on tv, crying in front of statues and we consider them mere sheep following the shepherd. We tell ourselves that we would behave different in their situation, that they should stand up to power if they feel so. Conditions created and kept in place under responsibility of current political powers in the west, as always mainly the US, and South Korea. The sanctions they impose that – indeed – seem like the only good measure without direct involvement on the ground, in reality do more harm to the average North Korean than they do to the regime. I don’t know the right solution. I’m not even sure there is one. Ideally the Kim family and their support is removed from the pluche seats they are in, after which…well after which, I don’t know what should. I guess what I’m trying to say is, don’t listen to the news updates, they’re not telling you what’s most important. It’s the individual stories that matter. It’s my friend Kwon Lim, born in Chong-jin, the industrial city on North Korea’s east coast, who fulfilled one of his major dreams when he traveled and studied in the US for three months last year. It’s my friend Kim Mi-Hyang who majored in Seoul in social science but who’s now taking education to become a hairdresser in her own salon. Their stories, those are the important things. Of broken families, of contact lost, of always being made aware of the rules, of being tracked and chased, and of incredible resilience. Some 35.000 have managed to defect. 25 million still remain.
Did that sound preachy? I’m sure it did. It’s Sunday morning after all. I’ll be heading out in the sun soon to collect a few more upbeat stories for you.
June 4th, Utrecht
These are delirious thoughts I had while riding the train back, crashing for fifth time in the day from a sugar high, the only thing that keeps me going and sane. It is this. We do a re-branding. Yes, I know you’ll say the corporate shite has gone to my head, just hear me out. Straightread.com gets put to the archives for posterity, the name doesn’t keep up with the times anymore with its heterosexual connotations. So on June 14th we launch FalseKnausguards.com – a name that in hindsight I regret not pursuing adamantly when it was on the table. And what is it? It’s our calling card to publishers. June and July writing go back to the original roots and a correspondence between friends watching twenty two men kick a ball. And we’ve never expected anything, but this time my expectations are high quality posts mixing football, culture, literature and the pursuit of women. And while so far we’ve been under the radar, I’d like to launch a full out attack on all social media streams, your standard IGs and FBs, plus the slew of new ones: TikTok, Snapchat, Bumble, ChatGPT, to advertise our work. A potential merch drop in the summer if we hit the milestones. Once that’s done, the real work of getting a publishing deal begins. In North America we’d go on a show called Shark Tank where we offer a stake of our earnings to four self made millionaire douchebags full of themselves, here, I am bereft, but I know there is a pot of cultural funds somewhere to be had, and whoever is in charge of that, we’ll direct to FalseKnausguards.com and I’m not signing anything less than a 300,000 euro publishing deal to write a book about the 2026 World Cup with the same premise. In the next days I propose a townhall to deliver this new and exciting strategic direction that we are going to embark on.
June 6th, Utrecht
I’m sitting here on the bench where if I haven’t written to you from, then I’ve written about. The one near my house, where sometimes I watch the sunset and the boats. Including the famous rich old retired people cruise ship boat, but mostly industry boats, which are also not without their charm either. But it’s a different feeling, here and now. I think even a year ago when I was writing or being here, it felt good, I could feel happy about living here in this neighborhood and within proximity of a lovely bench. At the moment I am totally indifferent to it, that feeling of belonging is no longer with me. And it’s an even starker difference if we look back to, say 2017, when my mom first visited me in the Netherlands. With much excitement we did the tourist rounds, Rijksmusuem, kayaking to the pancake house, dinner out with my circle of friends, and I remember before leaving she said that she could see that I finally found my place in the world. It’s not that I dislike the place now, it is perhaps that it no longer fascinates me to the same degree, and there’s some unconscious discomfort, not of not belonging, but maybe also an indifference, as for the people here are also indifferent if I am here, which I suppose was always the case, but now this mutual indifference has got me questioning my being here.
I suppose this is all stemming from my job dissatisfaction. Today, another day wasted. It’s the going into the office that kills me, that’s what I’ve noticed. Because when I’m working from home, I can escape into some mediative Fosse during my lunch, even for ten minutes here and there. And I can tend to some of the day to day things that life requires; paying the water bill, ordering some socks, calling the water boiler company for repair. So let’s call the working from home day really six hours. That’s kind of palatable. Versus today, which was ten hours of my life that I’ll never get back. But we’ve got to make a living, but do we really have to? I’ve explored the thought before, yet I always come back to the same conclusion, that yes, we really have to. Tomorrow I should be back to my regular mood of tolerance and acceptance for giving up my life in exchange for financial compensation. Today it still weighs heavy and perhaps now you know why I look to the retired people on the cruise ship with envy, essentially wishing the next twenty years to pass by so I can be one of them. And I wonder how it would feel to see myself as one of them.
Anyways, sunset and Fosse time, not a bad way to finish after a horrible way to start.
Friday night, June 7, Seoul
I am writing this between a movie and an evening walk. Im Westen nichts Neues, a movie remake of the lauded book classic, just finished. Inyoung’s out with friends. A good opportunity for me to get to this movie that’s been on my shortlist for a while. She would have hated this one. If you’re up for two-and-a-half hours of the most depressing war images, it comes recommended. If you’re not, stay far, far away. I reckon the book is better than the movie, as they always are and should be, but it was a worthy way to spend a few solo hours on the sofa for. I ate two chicken burgers and a serving of cajun fries over the first thirty minutes of the movie. A choice that was hard to justify seeing soldiers being blown to pieces, eating scraps, chewing dirt. But what’s the alternative. You can’t accommodate the atmosphere of every tough movie with a serving of brown muddy soup with half a boiled potato and the peel of a month’s old turnip.
I read both your posts a second time before getting to it myself and they seem somewhat conflicting. Not factually conflicting, more emotionally. First you embrace everything that’s wrong about current day consumerism and then it’s the daily rut of walking into an office to churn out whatever irrelevant data that’s the root cause for whatever is wrong with the world. As for the feeling, or better non-feeling you sense sitting on that bench, isn’t that just a common notion everyone comes across after the initial adventure has passed completely? The ambition to own the BMW, and then to find out owning the thing isn’t all that much. There’s your choice. After the BMW, continue onwards for the Porsche, the second BMW or for a life without a car. The Netherlands is now ‘just’ the Netherlands for you. It’s home. You know all you need to know. Wherever you go next (if you go next) you’ll be able to write about your Utrecht life just as you can write about your Canadian life now. Korea is slowly but surely turning into Just Korea too. There’s the bakery, there’s the hairdresser, there’s the bus stop. The same faces, the same streets. We’re screwed with our long term memories. If only the disks were formatted every now and again, it would keep things a lot more interesting.
I’m thrilled to hear your plan to write something together over the summer of ’26. It’s quite a long wait if you ask me, but I’ll take what’s available. Let’s hope we survive until then.
What is it you want from writing in general Jack? Not this thing here, this is a little correspondence that can be parked at any time. Your writing that is. There’s a screenshot on my phone with a list of writers who got to the craft without relevant qualifications. By sending this I assume you mean to say regardless of having nothing to prove for it, they managed to achieve whatever they achieved. That’s a simple way to evoke a smile on my side, one that I’ve been guilty of myself oh so often. And yes, I had the smile. Knausgaard selling cassettes, Bolaño a bellhop. Sally Rooney an administrative role in a restaurant. You’d expect for the admin role to not be in the restaurant, such a waste of space. What if we approach this from another angle: Because of their background, they achieved what they achieved. You got the job you didn’t want but wanted anyway. There are Fatima and Milo who deserve lots of your time apart from the ten office hours (why ten? that should be eight). There is still time spare to write my friend. Write in the train, write in the night, write early morning. Don’t blame the circumstances. You got a list of names and their respective early career moves to disprove your despair. You want to earn a few bucks writing? Get to it. Craft a novel or the memoir of your years in the lowlands prior to heading back to Canada. Expand the blogging? I’m here to help.
I know all too well it isn’t easy if there’s not someone else in charge. Someone else to blame for doing the things the wrong way. It requires power, persistence, stupidity, the last bits of your energy, but it is all there. You enjoy writing, I enjoy reading what you write, which tells me others would do so too. Combine the things and don’t get in your own way. Ten minutes a day. An hour a day. An essay a month, a chapter by August. Pen and paper, voice notes, phone scribbles.
=CONCATENATE(text1, text2, …)
Quarter to eleven, I need a little walk to rid myself of World War One images. Realising I stretched things here, I hope this didn’t offend you. But seriously, 2026? I asked in the book store but they don’t sell the ’26 agenda’s yet.
June 12th, Utrecht
One of the most irritating things that I find in this world is reading and hearing about people’s dreams. My tolerance for that in a book is no more than one or two pages, anything else and you must imagine the star rating bar shrinking with each sentence. One writer that gets it right is Andrea Camilleri, he’ll often start a book with Inspector Montalbano caught in a dream or nightmare. It’s no more than a page, and often involves women and food. He’ll suddenly awaken, and then pursue either of the two or both, in the real, well fictional real world. This is good. If my memory serves me correctly, not once in the 3,000 pages of My Struggle do we hear about Karl Ove’s dreams.
It doesn’t help that I’m in the midst or before my morning coffee when I need to hear about my wife’s dreams. A simple I dreamt about this would suffice and not test my patience, but it is her wont to tell me all the knitty gritty details; a friend was wearing this and said that, the light in the car wouldn’t go off, the clouds were neon green…god dammit woman, give me the gist, the main emotion and let’s get on with the day. The first time I lambasted her for this practice she stood in the kitchen with her mouth agape at my cruelty and inconsideration.
Now, there are exceptions to every rule, and I want to tell you about one of the best recurring dreams that I have had over the last few years. I am reading, actually reading, I am seeing sentences on a page and I am reading. And who wrote those words? It was none other than I, for who else? And how to explain it, because I have written in my dreams, somehow this translates to the real world, because it was not just images and emotions in those dreams, there had to be a mental process behind the words that I was reading. In my dreams, I was an author, and from there it is only a few small steps from to becoming one in real life.
June 13th, Utrecht
We’ve been chatting a little on Whatsapp, I’m doing a little bit of this and that. Physically I am here, but in my mind I’m in Japan. Ryo Fukui is playing from the speaker system and in front of me there’s some bourbon, a pack of cigarettes and a coffee. I have a book with me, and to add to the cliche I’m reading Murakami, I’m sure I’m not the first to travel all the way to Japan as a fanboy. If you want, you can even say I’m in his old jazz bar. I’m meant to visit a Tokyo Verdy match later in the evening since I’m here on assignment to write about some of the football culture in Japan. You asked what it was that I wanted from the writing, well, something like that would be part of it. An income from doing that – it’s not even impossible. A large part of life is defining what you want (not what you don’t want), so if I have that, it’s something I should go for.
On the opposite spectrum, I also don’t want anything. In fact I guess you could say I started writing this way. First to voice more commonly my displeasure with books, and less frequently my appreciation. Those so-called reviews somehow expanded into stories and feelings about my life, I’m not sure when that shift happened exactly, and obviously it was not really the place for such trivialities, but I couldn’t have cared less, nor about who was reading it or what they thought. And it felt really good to write that way. In a way, I really understand Fosse’s Ales when he said that he’d get pictures stuck in his head, and that he needed to paint them away. That is sort of how I felt with the books and writing. I’d be reading and these thoughts about my life and ever so faintly it’s relation to the book would come to me and I’d be thinking about it here and there and then once the book was finished I’d dump out all these thoughts and try to arrange them in a way that worked.
I suppose now we’ve advanced to this, and after a year and a half, there is some kind of stalemate. A rambunctious 20 month old and corporate ball and chain don’t help the cause, but I want to find a way to make it work.
Until then, I need to go back to concatenating and summing if.
June 17th, Utrecht
Here’s the weekend football recap from this neck of the woods. Germany/Scotland: Youtube Highlights. Saturday’s games (can’t even remember who played): Youtube Highlights. Poland/Holland: Checked the livescore on my app a few times, Youtube Highlights, minor satisfaction looking at the Orange Army party shuffling left to right. Denmark/Slovakia (or Slovenia): minor satisfaction to know Erickson scored a goal, Youtube Highlights. Serbia/England: Watched the last twenty minutes while in the trumpet basementing, you know what I mean. Damn, that was boring and uneventful. This morning awoke to find headlines filled with admiration for Jude Bellingham – who in the hell is on his PR team? Must find out and partner with them for our blog. Did you go on LinkedIN lately? To say you’re excited or proud of something? If you did you would have found the page awash in the newest marketing campaign. I think before you had a gripe about The Beatles being used in that capacity. Just imagine a chubby middle aged Marketing Executive – thick artsy glasses, a paunch proceeding from his T-shirt tucked in between a sports jacket when the two neurons fused and in all his creative splendor came out with ‘Hey Jude, it has to be this’. I swear I once was invited to a meeting of marketing minds, and this middle aged man taught us lifelong lessons from his world. We drove to a fancy hotel, making a stop at, where else – Starbucks and for a whole day I sat in awe as this middle aged man embolden me, I looked at him as a father and clinched my asshole as he crescendoed into the the One truth of marketing: Integrity. His twenty year junior Eastern European assistant had fully converted to the West; I remember vividly a stunning sweater draped over her voluptuous figure, emblazoned with some fierce creature, a tiger or possibly a centaur, and below it the words ‘KENZO’. I looked at her with admiration, the name Kenzo conjuring something japanese, okay it was luxurious but it also served as some kind of warning, not to question the master, not to question The Marketing; otherwise the Kenzo would be unleashed. Lunch was canapes from a catering company, a little overkill for the five of us. I’d have been happy with a communal kapsalon, and a new and exciting drink at the time, also bearing Japanese connotations: Kombucha. The sandwiches were pierced with a long toothpick and, unsure of the proper etiquette I’d place the entire thing in my mouth, gripping the bread in between my teeth to dislodge the bite sized morsels. It dawned on me that I had my own Japanese buzzword to offer to the group and I may have been invited there to share with these people the Kaizen method, something that my second boss taught me. Continuous improvement, sensei. But the fat chic guy in the glasses wouldn’t stop talking. As the Finance guy I later saw the invoice for the day, and it was then I realized I had been totally in the wrong department. Back to Jude and gang, I can picture that fat chic guy, ten years later, fatter, chicier, the assistant moving on to even greater forms to distinguish herself now walking into the boardroom, this time with a real life tiger on a leash, and this time the creative genius resulted in the slogan You Got This, and when those three words were whispered a hush descending around the table. And for those three words – they’re not any three words! They’re the result of years and year of marketing research and NPS scores – the agency receives a million dollars. Next up marketing awards, recognition, LinkedIn posts aplenty. There was a time when I’d have thought there was something really behind this besides an old man getting blowies in the Citizen M hotel.
June 23, rainy Seoul
We’re in between two games, an hour spare for an update from the far east. The Czechs and the Georgians settled for a fair draw. Dancing from left to right, a lack of midfield on both teams, a game made interesting more by the things the players couldn’t than by the things they could. Lots of would-like-to, and not enough can-do. A referee waving his yellow card too easily, passionate fans in the stands, especially the Georgians. My lack of knowledge of football these days is showing as I didn’t know 90% of the players’ names. A penalty scored and a lucky scrimmage.
There’s the intention to watch the Turks against the Portuguese but the little disclaimer I added this morning, the one that allows me to fall asleep prior to start, seems not so little anymore. From the outside one can easily be tricked into thinking I’m taking these Euros seriously as I also watched the Orange against les Bleus, a game played last night in the western parts of the world but here an early morning one today. Don’t be tricked though. I’ve only watched the two games of the Dutch and the one just now, and can relate to your brief update listing summaries watched. Based on four, five-minute summaries, I don’t feel we’re missing out on much. Do we? The Spanish and the Germans seem so far to be the most impressive ones. The new setup with 32 teams is ridiculous though, as a mathematical approach already in the second group matches seems to applied. While we were treated to a few boring, calculated final group matches before, this has now infected the second games as well, with several of the number threes also preceding to the next round.
Meanwhile the Ajax non-international players have also returned to the training grounds for the new season already. The team has to play early preliminary rounds for European cup qualification (Serbian Vojvodina being the first opponent) and has recently been equipped with a full new coaching staff, sufficient reasons to get started with the 24/25 already. The latest star on the roster? An Italian born in ’89, recruited from OGC Nice. Isn’t that a little old for a new player, you ask? He’s the new head coach. An obsessed wizard, they say. Where were we age thirty-five Jack? Running our lunch loops around the Ouderkerkerplas, I guess. And pleasing the Lathams, the Gregfernandeses and all the other irrelevant stars on the three-striped firmament. We weren’t coaching the football team with the richest history in Dutch football, that’s a certainty.
Inyoung’s gone for the weekend with friends. Hence the possibility to watch three football games in a day. I even watched a Bong Joon-Ho movie over a take-out pizza dinner. It truly is a bachelor’s day without any responsibilities. It’s been humid and rainy today. ’Jangma, the rainy season, is here. Rain all weekend and more expected next week, combined with a thick 25-30 degrees. The new fan Inyoung bought earlier this week has been whizzing without a break. Tom Waits is playing in the background, rain dropping between the two buildings just outside the open window behind me. People in one of the neighbouring apartments are watching a game show. We’re just past midnight and I wouldn’t be surprised to catch a whiff of a late-night instant noodle snack making its way through the window.
You’re probably wondering if and how I’m getting along with Fosse, and I have to be brutally honest in admitting that I still haven’t found the courage or the mindset. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve been distracted. I’m reading short works, 100-150 pages, or Dutch novels, all to keep things simple. Your reviews of Fosse confirm exactly what I was thinking in May when we were talking about starting earlier, it confirms exactly why I want to read the next parts, but I’m equally certain that I would be butchering the experience trying to force my way through the pages with that little bit of loose focus that I’m pulling off to read these days. I hope you don’t mind too much. And if you do, you’re right to do so. We committed and I’m slacking. I finished another Modiano yesterday, a pleasant experience, but the first Modiano where I felt a little disappointed at the end. With all five or six earlier readings of his work being satisfying and upwards, I’m not sure whether this one is simply not reaching the standards he set with his other works, or whether this was also caused by fragmented concentration on my end. It may well be. Last night, I read an eighty-page memoir by Annie Ernaux, Exteriors. Beautiful. Eight or so chapters, dedicated to an equal amount of years back in the 1980’s. Shreds and pieces, short paragraphs, pictures of personal but also societal experiences. If ever I’d want to put down a few thoughts and memories of my own, Ernaux would be an inspiration. She writes in images. I like that. It tickles my interest for photography. I can see her sitting on a Parisian park bench, taking a few notes, then heading home at the end of the day to bring the notes to live by swirling these in chemicals in a red-lit darkroom. Hanging fragments of writing to dry on a string that stretches across the bathroom.
It’s almost time for the next game. I’m still awake; this writing seems to help keeping things awake a little longer. If only for the first half then. Goals I hope. That’s what one would expect from a Portugal – Turkey game, right? Or flat-out football war. Ten aside by half time, a coach directed to the stands, seven yellow cards and sixteen minutes of extra time. One can hope. The rain continues, and so do I.
June 26th, Utrecht
By no means is it a contest, or maybe it is – I have been fed this capitalist dogma regarding competition for most of my life, and it is meant to be good. So I’m one upping you with a lackadaisical approach to Fosse: I am not committed to football. The epicenter of Home and Away, and a safe starting point for mindless drivel. We are supposed to watch games, try to factor in some literature because why else did I read the behemoth that is The Eighth Life, if only to be able to relate the 4-2-2-2 tactics of the Georgian team (how dafuq do you do that?), and then write about our own lives in between the games. Instead I have felt nothing but indifference towards the tournament. It must be my favorite word and mood of the year. But no, it doesn’t seep into other aspects of my life, as my friend whom I shared this listlessness with suggested, that it is the onset of a mid life crisis. Place, job, football – maybe, but everything else is fine. I am simply too busy to watch 90 minutes of football and I’d rather use that time to do my Big 5, which I won’t list again. But here we go. France vs NL was taken in bed on the phone and with headphones while Fatima slept. I’m still fascinated that there was light at the end of the game, approaching eleven PM, and it would last a little longer, being the summer solstice and all, this thought tinged with sadness because I just stared at this small screen at this meaningless game when I could have been outside experiencing that instead. Also meaningless yet more meaningful. That’s the only game I’ve watched, sometimes I can’t even be bothered with the highlights. It’d be a real pity if this were to last, because I’d love to indoctrinate Milo with the game. Some of my strongest emotions with my own father relate to the game, watching live or on the couch. Did I tell you that in ‘94 we watched a Canada vs The Netherlands friendly in person at Varsity stadium in Toronto? We arrived at the stadium to find that the tickets were sold out, and then were taken in by some bigwig who must have seen the sad look on my face. While typing this and trying to think of that day, if my memory isn’t playing tricks, then I remember two Dutch fans and one of them had a hole in his head. But I think I am mistaken about the game, not the hole. There are no intentions of watching any games this week, if so, it’ll be in bed again to doze off after all the dust settles.
At the moment I”m supposed to be working, reading and summarizing some contracts, asking myself if the Chat GPTS are trustworthy enough to do that – I think so, and if there’s an error I’ll point my finger at it. With that time gained, I’m writing, and I read your post, with pleasure. Geert Mak is entertaining enough – I could do without a recap of the major news events this century, I’d prefer if that was kept to a minimum and rather he focused on the people on the ground asking their experiences and feelings. It is good to cleanse the palette of Fosse, however.
While I’m here, I might as well write something about writing, which I had wanted to write about recently. Refer to the above, the cleansing of the palette. I’m not 100% sure if I had written that before, if I had read it in a book yesterday or even if you had written it in what I just read. Do you ever experience that? Forgive me if I have written it before, for repeating myself, or worse, if I have plagiarized you. Somehow, if it’s something that I read somewhere else and suited the way I currently wanted to express my thoughts it’s, well, more palatable. In an ideal world, I suppose the AI could point this out for us.
Weeks and weeks of rain and clouds, which suited me just fine have given way to beautiful sunny days. Work is on the backburner, as this testifies. Boss texts to say he’s BBQFH, er, WFH all week, and the minions that we are follow suit. ChatGPT and AI raging to the hilt, my feet up, collecting cash money – now who in their right mind would say that this so called capitalism is a bad thing?
June 25, Seoul
It’s the 25th of June today in Seoul. You wrote your post on the 26th. Apparently. A play of dates I didn’t understand, a simple typo, an intentional confusion to add a layer of sciencefiction to a post that’s otherwise by no means futuristic. Reasons unclear. I’m subtly moving us back to current day happenings.
A Dutch man with a hole in his head. The ’94 World Cup. My favourite cup memory. Eleven years old. The simple joy of collecting the player’s cards. Players I knew from tv and magazine, but so many I had never heard of before. Looking back, which I happened to do last week, so many exciting teams and players. The entire Nigerian team. Yekini and Okocha. Just before the cup Ajax bought two of the Super Eagles, their brilliance was yet to be revealed to us. Finidi and Kanu. Both a critical role in the team that won the ’95 Champions League. Then there were Hagi and the Romanians. The Swedes surprising the world with goals. And the Bulgarians. Oh man, the Bulgarians. Letchkov and the little triangle of down atop his forehead, dominating center field in boiling hot American arena’s. The haircuts too: Valderrama, Lalas, Baggio, Sutter, Dunga (the Brick-cut), Letchkov again. The Brazilians beating the Dutch at half time. The Dutch beating Brazil after half time, Branco beating the Dutch in freekicks. Al-Owairan’s masterful solo. Escobar laying the foundation for one of the best sports documentaries ever made, an ESPN doc about the two famous Escobars and their connected lives. There’s that Columbian team too. Fausto Asprilla. Eight teams less than the current Euro’s, speaking to the ridiculous inflating of tournament rules. And then there is the unknown Dutch guy with a hole in his head. An almost mythical, magical realist creature of sorts walking around the States, scaring off naive Canadian boys.
Don’t fret not watching the matches, you’re not slacking, I’m not watching much either. It was just that one day this weekend. The house empty and a lack of energy to do active things that made me watch.
Reading of Italy’s final, final minute escape made me smile this morning.
We’re granted a little respite from scorching summer heat by the weekend showers, it’s a comfortable 25, 26 today. More heavy rain to fall over the next weekend. I’m about to leave the house, the museum I plan to visit opens at ten and I aim to avoid groups of school kids on field trip by entering first and keeping a solid pace marching through the collection. It’s the museum dedicated to Korea’s alphabet so the field trips are very likely. After the museum tour, I’ll see if there’s coffee and a table in or near the museum to get a bit of studying done on location. If not, I’ll consider retreating to a library instead. Tuesdays without a schedule. There may even be more writing done. No hard promises.
June 25th, Luesden
You have to wonder what was going through his head when his fingernails strained against the pasta that cemented onto the side of the pot. Something like, fuck, they don’t pay me enough for this shit, or fuck, why can’t I just do what I want to do. Fingers itching to write instead of scraping sour hollandaise caked in between the tines a silver fork. Fuck those rich assholes out on the floor. Fuck Pinochet. I’m talking about Bolano the dishwasher, my brother, since today I’m Miskiewicz the keyboard monkey. I can’t even have any real gripes with the world, the only injustice it has given is in the way of work, that I have to come here to the office and pretend to be doing something, at some point I will have to do something, but that something is not something I’d like to be doing. In the case of Bolano, perhaps it made the man and the writer. Here, you can already tell what’s happening. An endless cycle of complaining about working and not writing, for twenty five more years. Just imagine, wildly imagine that somebody hears my cries and says, ok Miskiewicz, from July 1st, you get your wish. For forty hours a week, you must read, write and research. Every month we’ll deposit you 3.5 k EUR to cover your expenses and a little savings for down the road. Go.
Am I happy then?
The space time continuum is in disarray. Night is day, day is night, tomorrow is now, then was before. The 26th really was yesterday, but only two days from now. Training Milo to sleep alone has been a challenge. Already at his early age he detects his father’s weakness as a pushover, his cries directed at me mean I am there comforting him within seconds, meanwhile mama is angry that I am not taking the hardline like her, thankfully her exhaustion prevents any attacks at the father. It’s a shit show.
Exercise number 49 from Arban teaches students lip flexibility. A high G is played followed immediately by a F sharp on the staff, before jumping up again. Don’t forget to articulate with sTAccato. Ta-Ta-Ta. AtTAck the note. And so it went, the Italians with their last push up the field scored a beautiful goal. Te-te-te or the personal preference of my teacher, tje-tje-tje for the higher register. 3 and 2, and 1 and 4 and. The metronome out of sync, again, disarray, mysteriously 8 minutes appeared from nowhere. The man on the bench who cheated time for years could only bite his shirt. It had finally caught up to him.
June 27th, Utrecht
With my newfound wealth (ugh, I mean my pittance that allows some sustenance for my clan – but no, I won’t go there today), I have temporarily lifted the moratorium about purchasing books this year. I’ve had Stefan Zweig on the radar for quite some time now, a random goodreader commenter had responded with this writer when I posed the question along the lines of which author made your jaw drop, after he had read about my enthusiasm after American Pastoral took my Roth virginity. Now, I’m not much of a chess man. I truly wish I was, to tick that box on the intellectual wannabe checklist, but truly I am not. Nope, I don’t play the long game when it comes to that. Two moves is the maximum plotting, and more often than not my next move is done on a whim. Strategical mastermind, despite it being listed on my resume is not my strong suit. Maybe that explains my complete failure in the corporate world. Playing checkers instead of chess, as the saying goes. Anyways, I hope that the book, Chess Story, doesn’t go deep into that territory, otherwise it’ll largely be lost on me and I’ll need to seek out the checkers version, if there is such a thing. The entire reason I’ve started to write this, in between booking an invoice, is because I’ve ordered the book from something called boekwinkeltjes.nl, the antithesis of amazon. It would have been so easy to click on the hardcover available from Bezos, literally one click away, no faffing about with my name and address or payment details, yet instead I opted for the second hand version. Yes, I am gloating about my tiny contribution to defeat unfettered capitalism – this is my reward for now having to log into my Rabobank and entering the sellers banking details, a tedious task I think you’ll agree. With this transaction, I imagine a very elderly well read man – the copy I ordered is published in 1983, he’d have been forty or so and bought it on a trip to Long Island, as the copy is in English. He now sits in some enclave with his stacks of books, staring at his inbox awaiting his orders. It took no less than three minutes to get his reply about my purchasing inquiry. Later today he’ll check his own Rabobank to see whether my payment has been processed correctly, then glancing at his clock, he’ll see that he can make the PostNL cutoff. Scampering to the farthest end of his bookshelf, it is Zweig with a Z afterall, he’s flooded with memories on that trip to New York, his first time overseas, maybe his KLM ticketsub is still wedged between a chapter. He’s still using one of those dot-printers that make a terrible noise when printing the invoice, which he’ll place in the front, before carefully wrapping the book in brown paper and with a shaky hand write out J Miskiewicz (is he Russian? Slavic, anyways) and Joseph Haydnlaan (ah, Symphony number 94 la da dee, la da da), before petting Wilbur and scampering out the door on his omafiets to the local post office, where greeted by Haneke with her usual ‘Another book lover heh?’. Since the advent of Amazon you can’t say business is brisk, sometimes only one or two orders per month, so he makes sure that since he’s out of the house to stop by a terrace for a koffie verkeerd and an appeltaartje. Just like Tante used to make!
Or something like that, taking place. Next month, to make him happy again I’ll order a Modiano.
June 28, Seoul
The urban stretch of apartment high-rise between the metro station and the community center where my classes are, takes me ten minutes to cross by foot. Unlike my earlier student self, I wake up early by my own choice, leave the house in dito mindset and therefore am never in a hurry. Down the stairs to the connecting metro, up the stairs leaving the station after the final ride, there’s no need to rush, everyone is allowed to take my spot in whatever line they assume they need to beat. As calm and non-conscious as the home-class commute may seem, I end up walking that final stretch every day around the same time. Roughly between 8.45 and 9. This timing coincides with the youngest school-going kids going to, well, to school. You’d probably be better estimating this, but we’re talking the youngest range of elementary school kids. The older kids are all in school by then; middle and high school ages report thirty minutes before actual classes kick-off. Anyway, some irrelevant information here. The thing is, I walk the same two streets every morning and enjoy the spectacle that is the coming and going of school buses, shipping away Korea’s future to another day of elementary education. School buses a phenomena rarely seen in the low lands. They’re not as large as the North American relatives, which I’m guessing are publicly operated, or at least have a more general audience, one bus serving multiple schools. Here it’s the schools offering bus services for their students. Some bright yellow, most an off-yellow, commonly with school branding across the sides. The real fancy ones boasting Korean and English branding and a naming seal that makes it feel as if an institute loaded with history, tradition and (most importantly) wealth.
The thing is though – and what an unnecessary long lead-in – when I walk past on a sunny morning like today. Kids accompanied by one of their parents, flashing a colourful cap against the sun, backpacks with crocodiles and Marvel heroes, riding their kick-board. Parents too, carefully dressed, moms in summer dresses, hats and sun visors on, ensuring all kids reach the drop-off point safely, where the responsibility of care is handed to a caretaker, almost always female too, who rides the bus together with the kids and a driver, always an older man. It’s a female ordeal still but there is the occasional dad performing drop-off duty and always when I see one, I see one of my child-raising male friends. You were there too Jack. I’ve seen you bringing Milo to the bus. He didn’t care much for his dad waving from the sidewalk, already fully engaged in a conversation with several of his school friends. You were standing there a little off from the rest of the parents bunch, deliberating as you would every time on that piece of sidewalk, whether to engage in small talk conversation with the other members of the breeding livestock or whether you’d be able to withdraw silently and head home for that cup of coffee you were so longing for.
Realising that it’s probably weird for a forty year old male to pause and observe or to make use of one of the inevitable park benches nearby, between the apartment buildings, this snippet of life happens on the fly. I’m all but a passerby as I make sure to keep walking not to attract unnecessary attention. Once I turn the corner, it’s all done for the day. I may sometimes wish to look back, but I don’t. Steadily I trot onwards. There’s always tomorrow. Korean kids, the nation’s pride, its literal future, will forever be shipped out in off-yellow vans and not look back at their parents pointlessly waving at them.
And also, my morning fix of a coffee and a warm, salted croissant, are awaiting me just down the street.