h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Oy, you! Yes, I mean you. Back in there, Imp, ....and hurry up. The Limerick-thread is in desperate need of a clever writer.

Hi Krabatt II.

My plan was to slip out unnoticed, but I wandered over to the old place and your message reminded me that I had made virtual friends on this site, so an explanation seems in order.

I can't face making posts on hootoo anymore.

It'll probably sound pompous, but I have ethical grounds for stopping, based on how the site is funded. This is recent thinking, which started with an argument I had in a local pub.

H2G2 is paid for from the BBC licence fee, which is exceptionally large and rigidly enforced. I haven't done proper research on this, so if there are any factual errors here I trust that the moderators will point them out or correct them rather than throwing the whole post away. Anyway, I read somewhere that the UK television licence fee is the second highest in the world, and the most expensive one enforced by law.

According to the terms of their charter, it is supposed to pay for the cost of broadcast content, and this (for reasons of history) excludes online material. It seems to me that the BBC can quite fairly put stuff on the internet if it supports broadcast programming (the Iplayer for instance), but they have gone a lot further than that. The BBC's online news service has harmed local newspapers, and this in turn has hurt local democracy. In addition, the BBC's national and international online news services have undermined the web sites run by Britain's national newspapers, who have to depend on advertising revenues where the BBC has a bottomless well of money to draw on (well, something like £3,500,000,000 a year).

The BBC also runs magazines that push commercial magazines out of business.

It's a quirk of British law that the BBC licence fee is one of the few national charges that doesn't get reduced if you lose your job.

If you sign on as unemployed, you no longer have to pay for prescriptions or for dental treatment. You can apply for exemption from local tax, and pay reduced admission costs at theatres and exhibitions, but if you possess equipment that can pick up BBC broadcasts, you have to pay the full television licence or end up in court.

This means that if you worked for a magazine or a local newspaper that closed down in the face of unfair competition from the BBC and found it difficult to get alternative employment, you'd have to pay for your licence from your unemployment benefit even if you vowed never to watch a BBC programme or listen to a BBC radio station again.

I recently heard Mark Thompson (the Director-General) say that the increasing dominance of the BBC will benefit other media companies through partnerships. I find this hard to believe, and feel that in any case the short-term damage being currently caused to British web sites and printed publications is unacceptable. You can find the subject discussed here:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/shane_richmond/blog/2009/05/20/the_tories_and_the_guardian_are_right_about_the_bbc

I have a friend in a situation that seems relevant. He didn't lose a job at a magazine or newspaper, but he's struggling to bring up a baby on unemployment benefit, with another child on the way. He used to live in a very bad neighbourhood where the licence authorities were afraid to go, but since he became a father he's moved into a slightly better street and they pounced. He doesn't own a computer, and the licence fee makes a significant difference to his family's standard of living.

Therefore it seems to me that H2G2, admirable though it is, is built on the rockiest of moral foundations.

On the one hand I feel that anything that puts people from different countries in contact with one another is a good thing, but on the other hand the site is paid for by some of the poorest people in the UK under threat of legal proceedings, and with H2G2 the BBC is using that funding to provide a home for foreign computer-owners to chat without the inconvenience of advertising or subscription costs. No matter how amusing or intelligent the postings are, that seems to me to be a trivial use of important money, and wrong.

I hope I don't sound xenophobic. Though I live in the UK I was not born here, and I've campaigned for the relaxation of our immigration laws.

I have nothing to say about you or anyone else posting on H2G2, and as I said I had planned to slip out unnoticed. But I feel that even by putting silly ideas onto the limerick thread I would be supporting something I now disapprove of, and that (since you asked) you have the right to know why I'm not posting any more.

All the best.

Infie

Imp, as you know I'm not living in England. In Holland I pay for watching telly to the cable provider. I have different channels, Dutch, German, Belgian and BBC I and II. I The provider pays a fee to the BBC as it does to the other foreign tv-companies.

As I said, I've got access to many channels (though not as much as I want to but that's a different story. Then I just have to pay more fee). I just watch the Belgium telly, South Park on Comedy Central and BBC I and II. The eight or more Dutch commercial channels only show American made programmes and movies because those are cheap.

It's really annoying that they keep interrupting every program, including films, for a ten minutes commercial break. Would you like to watch telly and then have the movie be interrupted for 10 minutes break in which they show agressively loud, ugly and vulgar commercials to tell you to buy something you're really not interested in?

The price you pay is for excellent journalism, and some (not all) really nice programmes. All this without the interruption for commercial breaks. Believe me, for me that's a huge relief.
The BBC has an excellent reputation in the world for its journalism.
Its other programmes like those on wild life are world famous. The BBC is your national pride. What do you want? You want everyone to read one of Rupert Murdoch's rags?

I'm sorry to hear that those who are unemployed cannot have a reduction on the license fee. It would be an excellent idea if the BBC would consider doing this since not a lot of people are unemployed out of free will.

But I'll be damned that I give up going to this site, because you tell me I do not pay the BBC-license fee.

Hi Krabatt II

As I said, I make no comment about anybody else posting on this site.

The BBC has made some wonderful programmes. And I fully support a television station paid for out of public funds that does without advertising, and owes no loyalty to businesses that buy advertising time.

If they stopped there, they would have a huge round of from me.

But they don't stop there.

My argument is only about the BBC's use of public funds, paid for in part by the very poor, to crush competition from commercial magazines and web sites. The only protest I can think of is to stop posting on H2G2.

I tell you what I pay: 20 pounds a month for radio and television. 23 pounds each month for internet.

The programmes on three national dutch channels are paid for with tax-money.

We pay £142.20 per year per household, half price if you're blind.

Any cable or satellite charges are on top of that cost.

If you don't pay, you're not allowed to watch or record television broadcasts on a TV set, set-top box, video or DVD recorder, computer or mobile phone.

Because there's no mechanism for telling what you're doing with your equipment, this means that if you own a computer that's capable of viewing TV programmes, it must be covered by a TV licence. This affects students: if you leave home to go to university and own a reasonably sophisticated computer, you must have a TV licence whether you watch TV on it or not.

Kind of like a tax on learning.

Though it's separated off, the UK TV licence is really tax money - collected centrally and enforced by law. This separation means it's less fair than real taxation, because it takes the same amount from poor families as it does from rich ones. When Maggie Thatcher tried to do something similar with the poll tax, taking the same amount of money from the homeless as it did from the rich, there was a riot in Trafalgar Square.

By the way, I've just remembered another friend who's affected by the licence. He works for a charity and therefore earns very little (I have absolutely no idea about the figures, just that he's poor). He doesn't watch TV. I offered to give him an old set, but he refused on the grounds that he couldn't afford the licence, something that I imagine wouldn't have happened if he'd lived in the Netherlands. I eventually gave the set away on a web site called Gumtree, but I'd have been happier if he'd have taken it.

However, I don't complain about the licence as such. These are the rules of the country I live in, and I'm lucky to be allowed to live here.

I'm also not poor. Or at least not so poor that I can't afford a computer, or so poor that £142 per year makes a noticeable difference to my household expenses.

My argument is entirely about the BBC's non-broadcast activities. Imagine how you'd feel if one of your national TV stations used the money it got from the tax man not to make programmes, but to drive local newspapers out of business, or to run free internet services which other people are funding through advertising.

H2G2 is a lot of fun, but underneath it's like a reverse Robin Hood: money taken from the poor by force is used to provide a free service to the rich.

It was called 'Kijk- en Luistergeld' in The Netherlands, 'View- and Listening Money'. It was a tax on owing a radio and/or a television set. In the second half of the nineties it was abolished.
I never paid it myself (I had a direct line to the cable connection of my friendly next door neighbour). The girl living upstairs told me how her sister and husband bought a new television set and paid for it with her bank card. They went on a holiday a couple of days later. Her dad visited her house to water the plants. The doorbell rang, he openend the frontdoor and there stood this civil servant from the department of 'Kijk- en Luistergeld'.

Yes, I'm getting the picture.

'Kijk- en Luistergeld' is a lovely use of language.

It's got a bit extreme in the UK. Depending on which newspaper you read, there are 25 or 50 BBC executives who earn more than the Prime Minister. They spent £35,000,000 last year on hotels and air fares. They spend £100,000 a year on driving their two most senior staff between their office and the train stations every day (because they're on the phone making confidential calls, so they can't use ordinary taxis).

I don't mind all this nonsense. I imagine you have some sort of translation of the L'Oreal "Because you're worth it" advertising campaign in Holland. Well, Britain is full of businessmen who think they're worth it - and politicians, too. You may have heard of the expense account scandals of our Members of Parliament. I read that a Japanese executive earns three times as much as a line worker, a British executive earns 30 times as much and an American executive earns 300 times as much.

My guess is that these extremes will vanish in business, and that civil servants like the staff of the BBC will follow along a few years later.

My criticism of the BBC's activities outside of broadcasting is more serious. An entrepreneur sets up a web site or starts a magazine, hiring staff and providing work for ordinary people. Then the BBC uses public money to compete unfairly, and to close it down. To add insult to injury, because they're forced to pay their licence fees, the people who are thrown out of work actually fund the organisation that has robbed them of their jobs. In the case of local newspapers, BBC coverage is not as locally-based as the papers it's replacing, so local politicians are less closely scrutinised, and the country becomes less democratic.

What's more, as I said, the BBC is supposed to be working to a written charter that gives it no right to operate outside the broadcast media.

Let me see it I get this straight: The obligatory BBC license fee gives the company a monopoly position and the huge amount of public funding is not only used for its original purpose, broadcasting television and radio programmes, but is also unfairly put to use for fighting competition by local and national commercial newspaper agencies?
Well, it seems to me it's high time that Mrs. Neelie Smit Kroes, the European Commissioner of Competion has a look at the BBC's funding, its policy of spending public money, and answer the question if the BBC acts in accordance with the European rules for free competiion.

It seems that 240 years after his death the German poet Friedrich Schiller was heavily fined for being long over due to pay his license fee to the German government. Source: BBC.

One of the Dutch national unions has proposed that business executives cannot earn more than 20 times the amount of what the cleaner or the coffee lady in the same firm earns. Also the salaries of the directors in the (semi-) public institutions like housing corporations and in the health care are now under close scrutiny. These are more often than not exceeding the amount of what the PM earns.http://www.typically.nl/176/the-balkenende-income-cap/
The government is now prepared to cut down on the salaries for medical experts. The total cost of health care is rocketing sky high and one of the main causes is what these people ask in return for their expertise.

What causes me to worry the most is the total lack of solidarity and the indifference to the lot of the poor in this country.

I'm not happy with the idea of government limiting salaries. It should be possible for someone to come up with an idea (an invention, say, or a new kind of restaurant) and become rich. It's the people who take over the businesses later that irritate me.

I used to work for Xerox, which has an extraordinary history. The inventor of dry photocopying, Chester Carlson, was poor most of his life. He was an old man when the idea began to take off, and became very rich in his nineties (he gave most of his money away).

The executives in the early years of Xerox were sharp and witty. They ran an advertisement claiming that a child could make a copy (an outrageous claim in those days of wet diffusion transfer and wax stencils). When the American communications authorities questioned the claim, they were invited to a presentation in the Xerox head office. They sat in a row facing a copying machine. The door opened and a chimpanzee came in, made a photocopy and handed it to them.

Xerox set up a Research and Development department to come up with new ideas. By the time they came up with their greatest idea, the executives running the company were so lazy and self-important they never even got round to looking at it. That idea was the graphical user interface for computers that made so much money for Apple and Microsoft.

Nabisco, the American biscuit company, had its own air force – a fleet of jets for flying executives and supermarket buyers round the country to dinners and golf tournaments.

A man who used to be my boss used to tell a wonderful story about a trip he took to Detroit many years ago. He was a very junior member of a team making a presentation to the board of Ford, and he ended up having dinner with Henry Ford. Not just the two of them – a whole group of executives in an expensive restaurant. I'm not sure which Henry Ford it was, by the way, the name was passed down from father to son.

Anyway during a pause in the conversation, Henry Ford asked a question: “Do you know what we are?”

My ex-boss put his hand in his pocket for a pen and paper, assuming he was about to hear a motto he could live by for the rest of his life.

“We are the kings of the earth,” said Henry Ford. “That's what we are.”

These people ARE like royalty. They inherit their positions, or they get there by marriage, or they use political guile to climb their way to the top of a mountain someone else has built.

Thanks for the Mrs. Neelie Smit Kroes thought. I shall contact her and see what she can do about the situation. If nothing else, it will give the top men at the BBC something to think about while their £100,000-a-year limousine service speeds them through the streets of London.

It has become an absurd situation in this country. This week I was asked by three persons independently what I thought about the affair of the girlfriend of a singer with a football player? I had no idea what they were talking about. One said: 'yes, but she didn't sleep at home for three nights in a row!"

Meanwhile, Friday afternoon I was listening to the radio. There's this business program where people can phone in and voice their opinion. The DJ is a male, a former MP for the liberals. He's used to make firm statements against the socialist party on the radio. This afternoon his statement was that we should boycot eating aspergus. There had been a documentary on the telly and in it was shown how people from Romania were badly treated: packed like maltreated animals in a cellar without windows and fresh air for sleeping, underpaid, long working hours.

The listeners who phoned in to express their view were all males, and all of them wouldn't eat one aspergus less because of the treatment of the Romanians. One was an owner of a restaurant and cook. No, he didn't quite know the working conditions of the place where the aspergus he sold came from. But people enjoyed eating aspergus in his restaurant and paid well for it, so he would keep them on his menu.

Another bloke said it was clearly a case for the inspection on working conditions. It was the inspectors job to see to it that these people were treated according to dutch working standards. No, he wouldn't boycot eating aspergus. This was just an isolated incident.

The next said that these Romanians chose to be there for picking the asperges and if they didn't like the working conditions than they shouldn't be working there.

The dj, this right-wing former Liberal mp, was aghast by the total indifference expressed by these listeners.

Saturday morning I read in the newspaper what this 'girlfriend of singer having an affair with a football player' was all about. In a parking lot the football player and the girlfriend of the singer had kissed. The images on the video-tape was sold by one of the employees of the security company to a commercial broadcaster who had shown it on the telly. By the end of the week, even the PM had asked the journalists at the end of the weekly press-conference: "Aren't you forgetting to ask me about something?" He had expressed his sympathy to the girlfriend and the singer because he knows them quite a bit.

Right, so I live in a country of fools. They are well-informed, they know exactly what's going on, it's just they don't give a damn.

Nastiness is endemic, I'm sorry to say.

I saw a documentary on Dubai. They asked an Engish woman if it worried her that Asian domestic servants worked long hours and slept in rooms the size of cupboards. She said, "That's the beauty of it! You don't have to lift a finger!"

I read an interview with club owner Peter Stringfellow. He said that the A-list celebrities who came to his clubs didn't expect to pay for their drinks.

Our cotton isn't picked by African slaves any more. We pay poverty-stricken school-age children to do the job.

Not to mention the appalling cruelty we inflict on farm animals.

At least part of the problem is lack of leadership from the top. Venal politicians, paedophile priests, managers who live like royalty. Bankers who drive their companies into bankruptcy and get vast bonuses in return.

It may be changing, though. They say that depressions make people nicer. The new Archbishop of Westminster seems like a moral man. Perhaps one day even the corporation that owns H2G2 will behave decently!

Did I forget to mention that the owner of the asperges farm is a woman?

This dear lady coming out of the supermarket, she tells me about her long dead dog she got out of an animal asylum once. Meanwhile I'm wondering what she bought in the shop and has got stashed in her shopping bag.

The Christian Democratic Party traditionally delivers the ministers for agriculture. This party hasn't got much voters in the four main cities. However, it has a large support in the provinces, mostly farmers but most of all among ... women (family values). Every attempt to change the lot of farm animals is blocked by this party.

I forgot to tell you that the 'kijk-en ... ', license fee, didn't get abolished as such; it was incorporated in the income tax. (Friedrich Schiller got 203 - not 240- years after his death fines for not paying his license fee.)

Perhaps this link might be of some use in your fight for justice: http://ec.europa.eu/europedirect/index_en.htm

I hope you're right, that the economic crisis will make people more sensible, more compassionate. Personally I doubt it. History so far has shown the opposite. I think we, as citizens, should be careful. What beats me is how people with a good education can be so utterly stupid.

I find that the oldies, the ones who left school at the age of 14 and then started to work from eight in the morning until six or seven in the evening - had to walk to and from work because they couldn't afford to buy a bycicle at first - are the ones with the most sense, not only in intelligence and being sound of mind, but also with a good sense of humour. It's seldom I meet a snob or an ego-tripper amongst them. True, they didn't write masterpieces of literature. They've got a wealth of information, life experience, and they are not spoiled.

Education is a real mess, I think. Especially university education. Our universities run like businesses these days, and like all the other businesses they run on credit.

You take out a student loan in order to get a degree, in order not to have to flip burgers. It doesn't matter what your subject is (I know a microbiologist who works in advertising, a geologist in arts administration) but you need a degree, because the bosses are too lazy to choose the right person for the job and know that if you have a degree and it all goes wrong, they can claim they chose someone with qualifications so it isn't their fault.

Incidentally I read somewhere that if you join a Japanese company with a degree and no experience, they start you with all the other newbies. You have to prove that your degree has given you a competitive edge, as you work your way up from the bottom.

As you took out the loan to get the degree in order to avoid a job flipping burgers, it proves your cleverer than the people in McDonalds. And that makes you smug and lazy. As the L'Oreal advert says, "You're worth it".

And as you're such a smart guy, you don't need anyone to teach you morals. Quite the opposite, in fact. If the chicken you had for dinner spent its whole life in a tiny cage, the people to blame are the people you work for, who don't pay you enough to eat pheasant or grouse. If your shirt is made from cotton picked by children, that's because you can't afford the sea island cotton you deserve.

And you're worth far more than the children who pick the cotton, because they don't have degrees and don't have student loans to pay off.

Thanks for the EC link, by the way.

I read a story about a man who started work in New York in the Depression. He travelled by train every day, but couldn't afford the fare. He was issued with a stiff cardboard ticket, and the inspector would come along and punch it as the train ran along the tracks. He would then get down on his hands and knees to find the little bit of cardboard that had fallen to the floor. He would lick it and insert it into the hole it had been punched from. He would do this again and again. One day he handed his ticket to the inspector, and it fell apart - all the different punched-out pieces fell to the floor like confetti. The ticket inspector handed it back, saying: "Son, I think this ticket is just about used up."

That's the sort of attitude people have in depressions, at least that's the theory. Or there's that story from the Grapes of Wrath, which was made into a Country and Western song. If you don't know it, it goes like this:

Some truck drivers were sitting in a roadside cafe when a poor kid came in to buy a loaf of bread. It turned out that he didn't have enough money, but the waitress said she had a loaf that cost exactly the amount of money the boy had on him, and he went off proudly with his bread. One of the truckers pointed out to the waitress that the loaf she sold the boy was just as expensive as all the other loaves, and she said, "What's that to you?"

When they were leaving she called after them that they had left a pile of money on the table, and one of them said, "What's that to you?"

Maybe people will be like that. One can only hope.

I'd promised myself not to post anything on H2G2 again, but I'm enjoying having a grumble, in a bittersweet way.

Steinbeck, I've just checked the story of 'Grapes of Wrath' on the internet and I do not recognize it as a book that I've read in the past. I read 'Canneryrow' and 'East of Eden'. Come to think of it, Ken Kesey's 'Sailor Song' might be written as an hommage to Steinbeck.

Today, standing in line of the cue, I noticed that the bank- or creditcards of two different customers in front of the till bounced. Both of them were young people. Students, I think. So yes, the crisis is beginning to be noticeable. I read in the paper that nowadays also the government pays two days later than is expected. It could be that yesterday or today was the student's grants payday only the office responsible hasn't coughed up yet. Perhaps tomorrow, or the day after. But this is just one of my wild guesses, I just don't know.

I've always envied the Americans. They are far more skilled in argumentative discussions. That is because they have so many people with different backgrounds, different religions, different nationalities, different colors, different points of view.

I've noticed that in my country education is the faithful reproduction of what the teacher has been teaching. The teacher is always white, and upper middle class.
That's it: adaptation. That's what they want. Nothing else. They don't want their students to be creative and to become independent thinkers.

For instance, for several weeks we had been studying poems by Achterberg and this thing called 'deism', his longing for god. (One couldn't even mention he had killed someone. If you did it was considered as a 'faux pas'.)

The prepatory central exam Dutch language came a few weeks later, and of course it was about a poem by Achterberg with these .... mathematical phrasings and allusions. I was reading it and there was a certain rhythm and tension in it. So, I ignored the 'deism'-nonsense and explained the poem as an act of intercourse. I don't know what I expected, but not that the teacher would be so furious. She gave me a 1. And that is so typical. Achterberg was very humourous, he wrote many witty poems, but these teachers aren't.

I repeat, they just wanted me and every other single student to be, think and behave like them. That is the key to our higher educational system, to become a vain sheep.

Beg your pardon. Yes, you were saying ... please continue your story. I'm listening.

The Grapes of Wrath is a long book, but worth reading. Steinbeck followed the route his protagonists took, interviewing people along the way, so the story about the waitress and the bread may be true. The story about the train ticket is definitely true, I found it in the autobiography of a man who lived through the age and went on to find success in business.

There's a movie of The Grapes of Wrath starring Henry Fonda that skims over the story of the book. Worth watching in its own right.

I don't think the American education system is all that hot. Mind you, most of what I know about it comes from watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The English education system isn't much good. I read an article about a man who encouraged his daughter to do some reading around a particular period in history which she was studying, and got into trouble about it. What he didn't appreciate was that she was supposed to read the recommended books, and memorise them. If she read other books about the same period she would become confused by the different lights they threw on the subject. She might remember things that were not in those books, and lose marks.

Do you know the old Pete Seeger song, "Little Boxes"?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN3rN59GlWw

The crucial lines go:

And they all have pretty children and the children go to school
And the children go to summer camp and then to the university
Where they all got put in boxes, and they all came out the same

In the same vein, do you know the interview between Jann Wenner and John Lennon? Here's a quote that's relevant, about Lennon's schooldays:

People like me are aware of their so-called genius at ten, eight, nine. . . . I always wondered, ``Why has nobody discovered me?'' In school, didn't they see that I'm cleverer than anybody in this school? That the teachers are stupid, too? That all they had was information that I didn't need? I got f--in' lost in being at high school. I used to say to me auntie, ``You throw my f--in' poetry out, and you'll regret it when I'm famous, '' and she threw the b-st-rd stuff out. I never forgave her for not treating me like a f--in' genius or whatever I was, when I was a child. It was obvious to me. Why didn't they put me in art school? Why didn't they train me? Why would they keep forcing me to be a f--in' cowboy like the rest of them? I was different, I was always different. Why didn't anybody notice me? A couple of teachers would notice me, encourage me to be something or other, to draw or to paint - express myself. But most of the time they were trying to beat me into being a f--in' dentist or a teacher.

Or to take another example, David Lodge is a successful author and Professor of Literature in Britain and the USA. I once heard him say something really shocking in a TV interview. He said that what he did as a writer and what he taught as a professor had nothing whatever to do with one another. He said it as if it was quite normal and matter-of-fact, but it seemed like madness to me.

Education seems to be in the same kind of mess as banking and everything else. I'm too old to be in it, but it worries me. I have a nephew in his late teens. He was saying that he couldn't see the point in studying because there wouldn't be the opportunity to earn a good living at the end of it, and I didn't have a compelling argument to contradict him with.

Tell me about Achterberg. I couldn't find much on the net (I only speak English). Is he good? Do you have any translations of his work in English? Why did he kill his landlady?

I found a translation of his his poem 'the poet is a cow'. It was a competition. Underneath the 'jury report' you can find the different translations by the competitors. The first translation by David Colmer, I agree, is pretty good.

http://www.subtexttranslations.com/drptp/achterberg/achterberg.html

Achterberg's an excellent manipulator of the dutch language. The language he uses is quite cow-like, 'hoekig', in angles. As a reader I find myself constantly put in a position where I have to change my persepective. Reading the poem is like being a new born calf yourself that has just got on its feet and is standing there awkwardly trying to find a balans.
There is cruelty as well. It's hidden in the tenderness of the last lines: a new born calf is taken away from the mother immediately after birth because the milk is solely for human consumption. This cow dreaming of being a little calf sleeping with its mother during the night in the fog, is a mother herself whose newborn calfs were taken away from her.

Achterberg was aware of this. First of all he was born in a small hamlet in the country as the son of a farmer. He studied to become a schoolteacher. During the depression in the thirties of the last century he worked as a civil servant for the ministery of agriculture, and one of his job was to register new born calfs.

If I'm not mistaken he then worked in the building in the city of Utrecht that nowadays is called 'the inktpot', it's an imposing, angular, bit ziggurat-like, reddish-brown brick building with long narrow windows and with steps leading to its main entrance. Inside there is this dominating huge stairway leading to the next landings where along the corridors on either side are the offices.

'Des morgens kruipt een beest van vrees
door aderen en ingewanden
en maakt mij weder tot een ander
dan die ik slapend ben geweest'

'In the morning crawls a beast of fear
through veins and intestines
and makes me again to an other
then I have been whilst sleeping'

He lived in a rented room at the other side of the city, near the Wilhelminapark that was and still is the residential area of the establishment. The street he lived in, the Boomstraat (treestreet) is still an inconspicuous long, narrow and quiet street without any noticeable trees, that still breathes the atmosphere of 'petty-bourgeois'.

Why did he kill his landlady? Well, what I gather is that he was quite a womanizer. He was already engaged to be married, but started an affair with the landlady and then another one with her daughter. One evening the latter came into his room, he started to make advances, she protested, the mother came in, started shouting, opened the window and screamed something like 'rape' into the street. He took out his pistol, and shot her.

The judge found him 'not guilty' on the grounds of being psychologically unstable. He had been admitted into a psychiatric hospital before, and was know to have a rather violent nature. Still, he got TBS. This means that someone is put under the control of the government until further notice and receives psychiatric help. Meanwhile he married one of his former girlfriends. He published his poems, became a well known poet. He was released from the TBS-situation somewhere in the fifties. He died in the early years of the sixties of a heartattack.

http://www.kb.nl/dichters/achterberg/achterberg-06.html
There you see a picture of him as a young man, a picture of one of his fiances, the collegues of the school where he was a teacher, a picture of another financee. It is said that being in psychiatric care, he was released of social and romantic tensions and could concentrate fully on writing poetry.

My favorite poem of Achterberg is 'Dwingelo'. The small town Dwingeloo is near Westerbork, the former concentration camp for the jews. Initially it was set up and paid for by the dutch jews as a refugee camp in the thirties when lots of jewish people came from germany and austria to holland. They either wanted to live with their family or to travel from the port of Rotterdam to the US. Then the Germans occupied Holland, and the dutch jews were also transported to Westerbork. From there they were sent to other camps, mainly in Poland. Nowadays Westerbork it's a park for these big satelite dishes for radio-astronomy.

I do not know if I've got this correctly, I couldn't find the poem on internet, but this is how I've got it in my head and I've translated it rudimentary and badly:

'In het nooit dat nog komt zie ik u weer
blauw absentie houdt het weten wakker
en doet october tot een lens verstrakken
de dagen hebben haast geen wolken meer

Bij nacht laten Cassiopeia en Grote Beer
hun witte tekens knakken
om op het onbestaande in te hakken
het zeven gesternte gaat zachtjes tekeer

In Dwingelo hoor je het fluisteren
der leegte in de radio telescoop
daar lopen ook uw trillingen te hoop
verschijnen grafisch op een stuk papier
wellicht niet ongelijk aan deze hier.'

'In the never that is still to come I will see you again
blue absence keeps the knowing awake
and tightens October into a blue lens
the days hardly have any clouds anymore

By night Cassiopeia en the big dipper
let their white signs crack
in order to hack into what doesn't exist
The seven sisters cry out softly

In Dwingelo you can hear the whispering
of the emptyness in the radio telescope
there will gather also your vibrations
will appear graphically on a piece of paper
perhaps not quite unlike these here.'

From here I can go on to Harry Mulish who is an admirer of Achterberg and who wrote the Discovery of Heaven, a book that is based on Douglas Adams the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and also incorporates this poem by Achterberg.

But this is enough for now. Once I get started, I do not quite know how to stop. There is so much to tell. I hope I didn't bore you into the grave. I havent't even mentioned the reformed protestant religion that, no doubt about it, must have played a dominant role in Achterberg's life as it did in the Dutch society as a whole.

I've been listening to the song 'little boxes' and that other one sung by mrs Melanie herself. I think they are adorable. Doesn't Pete Seeger mention Woody Guthrie at the end who is also Bob Dylan's muse?

Ah yes, I found another Dutch poem, that is about happiness. It might interest you.
http://www.subtexttranslations.com/drptp/bloem/bloem.html

Again you can find the different translations beneath the 'jury report'.

I hope you like it.

I thought the poems were great. I particularly liked reading several translations of the same poem. I've been reading Eugene Onegin, and quite frankly couldn't see what all the fuss was about. My problem could have been the translation - I shall try it again, using three or four translations side-by-side.

Here's an English poem you may not know (scroll down, it's at the foot of the page).

http://thewordcellar.blogspot.com/2009/04/this-is-just-to-say.html

Getting back to education, when I'm puzzled about something I tend to see if Gresham College has anything to say on the subject. Gresham College is a free university in London (not just free: if you attend one of their lectures you get a couple of glasses of wine at no cost before you go home). The college dates back to the time of Shakespeare, but these days they record the lectures and put them up on the net. Here's one that relates to what we've been talking about:

http://www.gresham.ac.uk/event.asp?PageId=45&EventId=170

My view, for what it's worth, is that education can only tell you about the past. To take a pair of alternatives chosen by the lecture, if you study the subject of geography at school, then you get a certain amount of truth, because if you go to Paris it will still be there, as the geography books tell you. If you study tourism and learn the skills of booking and caring for tourists, you're on shakier grounds because (for example)

(a) The economy may change, meaning there will be fewer people who can afford to travel

(b) Technological changes may mean that people will book their own tickets over the internet.

(c) Travel may become regarded as immoral because of its effect on global warming.

A century or more ago, in the UK, people studied Greek and Roman history (at least in part) because it was assumed they would learn about human nature, so that when history repeated itself they would know what to expect. I've been doing some reading recently about the death of great nations, on the basis that history is possibly repeating itself in the USA (and to some extent in the UK). I heard a property developer saying (two years ago) that people were building things in London on a scale of luxury that hasn't been seen since 14th Century Venice. He said that without irony, just with admiration and enthusiasm, and is now bankrupt.

Do you people study Tulipomania at school? I've started reading The Black Tulip, but I've no idea if it represents any kind of historical reality.

Pete Seeger knew Woodie Guthrie and was very much interested in him. He's a much more sophisticated musician than Dylan (which wouldn't be difficult, after all), but Dylan is (or was) a great lyricist.

At the age of 12 the pupils of the elementary schools have to do a test, the national cito-toets. The results of this test and the estimation of the schoolteacher is decisive for which form of secundary education is going to be next for their pupils.

There is this school called gymnasium, 6 years, they teach Latin and Greek (drama and theatre as well) and the other usual subjects. After 2 years pupils decide whether or not to continue learning subjects like history, french, german, maths, chemistry, physics etc. Usually this form education is reserved for the offspring of the establishment.
Next to it is the atheneum but is without Latin and Greek. Both gymnasium and atheneum give direct access to the university.

Then there is havo (5 years). After that one has to do 2 years atheneum, or go to a four year education (hbo) for getting some higher skills in economics, or communication, tourism or engineering, whatever.

Then there is vmbo, that's for kids who will become plumbers, nurses in old people's homes, beauticians, sales persons in shops, you name it. After that they can go to mbo, then hbo, then university. It's a long road.

As for equal opportunities, this system is more in favour of inequality. A research done two years ago in Amsterdam shows that 41% of the pupils of Maroccan decent is sent to a form of secundary education that is below the level of their results of the national cito-test. The same goes for 44 % of pupils with turkish parents and 28 % of kids of both white and traditionally dutch parents, 34 % of children with Surinam parents.
The arguments of the teachers to send these pupils to a lower form of education than could be advised on the results of the cito-test is usually to do with what they call the 'social skills' of these pupils, the assumption that they wouldn't quite fit in.
One could also call it discrimination.

As for the gymnasium, traditionally for kids with white parents who are considered to be part of the establishment, I remember sitting in the office with a (sympathetic) collegue of my age, an university engineer, who showed me a book that was made of the reunion at his school. Together we looked at the pictures and the description of the lives of the former pupils. All the females had become housewives. The males prospered in their professional careersm just as my collegue in engineering, law or were university or gymnasium teachers.

As for the daughter of your friend, I recognize the story. Pupils are requested to learn the material the teachers provide for them and not to look beyond. For example, the history test for gymnasium, atheneum and havo a couple of years ago dealt with the colonial past of Holland in Indonesia. The subject is told in specially written history books for the pupils, provided by a special publisher for schoolbooks. Nothing was mentioned in these books about the massacres among the indonesians by the dutch. Nothing about this was asked in the final national test.

One could call that propaganda instead of history.
A couple of days past I came across several sites that say that queen Wilhelmina on the eve of the invasion was denied her request by the captain of the English submarine to be brought to Breskens instead of England. Never heard of that one before. That's a very recent, official view on history.

We might as well take the language and culture of the Aztecs or the Toltecs as a starting point for learning. Who decides what are the desirable subjets? Why greek or latin? Because we are european and the medieval scolars and writers were fluent in Latin? Perhaps because in Italy in what is called the renaissance there was a revival of interest in Greek culture and the masterpieces of art reflect this fascination? Should every pupil in every form of secondary education be made aware of this? What do their parents think about it? As far as I can see, most people go on holidays abroad nowadays, but do all of them visit cathedrals, museums, visit historical sites abroad? Do all of these parents share a passion for art, history and reading literature? If not, should the future parents be taught that passion? And yes, for what purpose?

I read Homerus and Sophocles in translation when I was in my thirties. There is no ban on curiosity, it's not forbidden to walk into a liberary or a bookshop and take your pick. Should I be worried that the girl of foreign descent that works in an old-people home knows nothing at all about dutch culture and history, that she never heard of the songs, for example, of Annie M.G. Schmidt, and hasn't got a clue about WW II, or who Den Uyl is, not to mention Drees? I don't know. Shouldn't she just know of how to dress and bath them and that is good enough for care taking of our senior citizens? Perhaps some oldies among them detest these since long dead socialists and prefer to talk about Colijn and Gerbrandy, if they want to talk about history and politics at all. Why mention the Primavera of Botticelli to an 88 year old under the shower, or discuss Antigone's dilemma at the breakfast table?

Tulipmania? Hasn't that got something to do with the fascination of the Turks in the time of the Republic for tulips? Huge investments and expectations of profits and then somehow the market colapsed and prices plummeted. I've come across it, but cannot tell you the exact story. I'm sure you'll find the story in english on the web.

I like both links you gave me. Thank you. Especially the one of the American writer, I can spend the next months exploring it. And I will. Except I cannot find the poem you mentioned at the bottom of the page. The only thing I see is some kind of wallpaper. Is there a hidden meaning to your words, I wonder.

Yes, Bob Dylan is a great lyricist. I can't be a judge of the quality of his music because I do not play any instrument myself. Still, I enjoy myself listening to him. He's music swings. Do you know Terry Callier? Apart from jazz, he sings also protest songs. Check him if you haven't heard of him yet.

As for the translations, the strenght is usually in the original language the poet or novelist writes in. Tom Sharpe in Dutch makes tepid reading. In English it's great.

I suddenly remembered the first time I talked to you. It was at the question only thread and you were pushing me to go to Africa and follow Bono's footsteps. I don't have anything with U2, I'm sorry.

I apologize for the bad spelling and the mistakes in grammar. I was tired last night, but thought it was about time to make a reply to your latest message. That last remark about U2 is more to say that I had the impression that you're very young person. Anyways, how are you? That's what I would like to know. Never mind the mess in the education system. I do like the story about the double horizons. Is there a sequel to it?