beneath london

I hear you like games.  Here’s a game if you aren’t from London, been to London, or are in London.  Also, you’re not allowed to google the answers.

Guess which one of these are not the names of actual places:

Cockfosters

Gasbreath

Dongslap

Tooting

Merkin

Itchface

Horishfartfordwelshire

A few of these places you can find in the famous “London AZ”, a kind of atlas you see tourists, and long-time Londoners peering into on intersections throughout the city.  I was unsure if I needed glasses until I opened one of these to a random page and was confronted with what can only be described as surrealist art.  Each page is a mishmash of tiny overlapping lines, words, and colours.  The roads are so tightly packed together, and in such a random layout, it would give a chaos theoretician an aneurism. 

If you are lost in the center of London I don’t recommend this book unless you plan on lighting its 1000 pages on fire to create a smoke-signal to alert a rescue team.  Of course the rescue team will probably get lost and be forced to light itself on fire in order to alert a further rescue team.

No, what you can do if you’re lost in London is ask a friendly local for directions.  Here’s an example of me asking a friendly local for directions:

“Um, excuse me.  I’m looking for the Exmouth Market.”

“The what?”

“The Exmouth Market.”

“You mean the Exmouth Market?”

“Yes, the Exmouth Market.”

“Well, it’s pronounced Exmouth.”

“Right, Exmouth.”

“Exmouth.”

“Right.”

“Exmouth.”

“Okay.”

“Exmouth.”

“Fine.  So, you know where it is?”

“No.”

I find this kind of behaviour ironic because British people themselves have no idea what each other is saying.  Quite a while ago I commented on the fact that I often found myself translating between two British people in Prague.  Well, the major difference here is that they don’t even bother with a translation.  They, through some kind of faulty psychic connection, imagine what the other person is saying and then act accordingly.

A conversation between two British people is less a conversation, and more two people having a monologue at each other.  This is so much so that I think that major policy decisions — like staying out of the EU, and invading Scotland — are made by total conjecture.

One person that totally transcends the incomprehensibility of the British dialects (there are approximately 987 of them, ranging from Cockney to Jimblewhist to Lying on Your Back in the Middle of the Sidewalk and Gurgling Your Own Vomit) and that is the person that does the announcements on the Underground — or “Tube”, but what everyone else in the world calls “metro”.

This is a curiosity because the very place where you must be able understand the information, as a matter of sanity, is the very place where you can’t understand anything the person on the PA is saying.

“THE CIRCLE GJURBINGTONFURTHS MELLLLL SVERBERCROCHANKS BODY ON THE TRACKS WILL BE DEPPLEDONG HABER KUNNINGMYER ZBEVER UNTIL SUNDAY.  PLEASE USE THE SUPPERBUBBLE TO KLAKKINGHORNFITHEL.  MIND THE GAP”.

The result is millions of people (yes, usually there are that many people on any given platform) are left awkwardly not making eye-contact for fear that someone might ask them if they understood the announcement.  Not that they’d understand the question in the first place.  What happens then is a sort of zombie-shuffle to the nearest opening where they ride an escalator up 23 stories to the surface and blink perplexedly in the sudden non-daylight.


Weekends are all about the operators, service-people, and staff of the London Underground.  These are the days when they are able to get back at the rest of London by arbitrarily scrambling the whole Tube system. They shut down some lines, half-close others, and invent entirely new ones that get you as far as possible from where you want to be.  The inevitable chaos is "mitigated" by posting "maps" that have been designed by 4 year-olds with attention deficit disorder.  Through an elaborate CCTV (Closed Circuit Television) system throughout the Underground they can amuse themselves by watching well-dressed, dignified people dissolve into sobbing, screaming messes on any number of of the city's many platforms.

Another interesting fact about the London Underground —  and what I believe illustrates the whole system — is that they announce when a certain line is actually working.  This means that the default setting for the entire Tube system is “broken”.  Also, this announcement: “THE CENTRAL LINE IS IN NORMAL OPERATION TODAY”, is pretty much the only thing you can understand.  Ignoring, of course, the fact that “normal” in this context is a matter of semantics.  There is nothing normal, or even remotely human about the London Underground.

When my Uncle Matthijs was visiting from Holland I commented to him that we commuters were being treated like cattle.

“You are cattle.” He said.

And it’s true.  The people that are grievously without entertainment; like an iPad, Kindle, the ubiquitous newspaper, or latest best-seller, have the same far-away glassiness in their eyes’ as cows.  I recall a YouTube video where some guys start playing live jazz in a field to some cows.  Gradually the ears of the cows rotate towards the strange new sounds, their heads slowly rise, and they begin ambling over towards the band.  Eventually they get there, form a neat semi-circle, and just stare curiously at the trio while chewing their cud.   The band stops, the cows slowly turn around and wander off.  These cows look more alert than the average person riding the Underground.  To be fair, I’ve never spent this amount of time in a city of this outrageous magnitude, so there is probably a deeper psychological thing at play — like there are so many people in the Tube that it has reached critical mass and the average human perception cannot take it all in without their head’s exploding.  Maybe, but I see other people, especially when they are extraordinarily cute.  I find myself smiling sometimes too — something I rarely see anybody else do — although this could be dangerous as I may find myself clubbed, thrown into a bag, and later released into nature to be with the other smilers.

Underground tunnel sizes range from “shoebox” to “drinking-straw” and the carriages are sized correspondingly.  For someone hovering above the 6-foot level this is uncomfortable to say the least.  It also seems that no matter what time of day it is these carriages are packed solid with humans.  Once while trying to board a Tube car I actually rebounded off of a mass of bodies packed so tightly I’m sure that many of the people deeper in the carriage had been compressed into diamonds.  I once jokingly commented to a friend that the London underground is where most British people are unwittingly conceiving, but when I looked to see if he had heard me I found that he had been compressed into a diamond.  Emerging from these cars is probably what a baby feels like coming out of the womb, complete with the stickiness and bone-shattering wailing.  One line in particular, the Central, defies laws of thermal dynamics by being — despite being deep underground, where it is presumably cooler — hotter than a Russian sauna.  This is either planned torture or hidden genius, because, really, the only way to get out is to get greased up with enough personal and commuter sweat that you sort of slide out of the carriage and plop onto the platform while trying to MIND THE GAP.

If you are a commuter in London you have to dress for three types of weather conditions just to travel in the Underground: dry windy freezing, hot dry stale, and hot humid stale wet.  Certain random cars within a given Tube line can simply be categorized as: gratuitous stank.  This is besides being prepared for London's natural outside temperature which is "fog".  I say, give everyone body-condoms like you see on bobsled teams and be done with it.

Incongruously people entering the tube stations are often handed newspapers like The London Evening Standard.  This is a cruel joke because they are broadsheet format and there is no possible way to actually open them while riding the Underground without taking up the space where 60 other bodies could fit.  The Standard, I’m told, is a quality paper, although I’m not sure how anybody would be able to tell.

Initially when I started writing this I was trying to cover many aspects of London but have found myself focusing solely on the Underground.  This is probably because it’s the place where I have been spending most of my time, other than my bed.  Schools and pubs play a very distant 8^th and 9^th positions. 

I’ll have a go talking about other stuff:

I live in a very dodgy part of town between Whitehapel and Shadwell stations.  I have dubbed these landmarks “Brownchapel” and “Shagwell”.  The first because the area contains the most East Indians outside of India, and the latter because it is funny.  I live in a “council estate”.  These optimistically called “estates” are designed for people with low incomes and on welfare — or “the dole” as it locally known.  These are hideously ugly buildings which hearken to the dreaded panuluks of the Czech Republic.  Duly, they contain the types of people that throw garbage directly out of their windows, cook food that smells like burning rubber, and have their televisions blaring loudly at all times of day.

(A side note about television here: I spent an evening watching it one day and identified many comedy panel shows; Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Mock the Week, QI, Have I Got News For You, and about twelve others.  What’s interesting is that these shows draw from a pool of about 4 comedians, and Stephen Fry — sometimes playing the role of panellist, sometimes playing the role of host.  And these people all seem to be either hosting or appearing in Live at the Apollo the same night.  Mind boggling)

(Another side note: Stephen Fry is a national treasure here.  I only hesitate to call him a Comedian because I think he has reached such a high level of pure intelligence that, for him, being funny is too easy to be called a career. 

The other comedians visiting each other’s shows  are Jimmy Carr, Russel Howard, Jo Brand, and Bill Bailey.)

I’ve done the touristy stuff like walk down Fleet Street, dodge camera shoots by large groups of Asians in Trafalgar square, been intimidated by Westminster Abbey and the Parliament building, and been wallet-raped by pubs in Soho.  All this has left me wondering one thing: with all the beauty of what’s available to see, how did the city look before it was bombed into paste by the Nazis? What is truly old in the city is what is the most stunning to look at.  Sure the Giant Turnip is neat, and Battersea is monolithic,  and the London City Hall looks like a bit that fell off the Giant Turnip, but St. Paul’s is astounding, the Tower of London (which doesn’t look remotely like a tower) is amazing, and whole neighbourhoods — Hampstead, Kensington, Paddington — are brilliant to walk around in.

I’ve only ever been invited to one other neighbourhood, and that is the trendy Shoreditch.  I suspect that this is because Shoreditch contains Brick Lane.  Brick Lane is where you want to go to if you like Indian food and don’t mind being harangued, cajoled, begged, and pleaded with by overzealous wait-staff to enter their establishment.  It's an amazing experience, albeit a slightly odd professional practice because, one; all the prices are pretty much the same along the whole quarter-mile stretch of Brick Lane, so they can only sell you on the discount, which they all say is 30%, and two; potential clients are afraid to get close enough to read a menu for fear of quickly being covered and drowned beneath a large pile of pleading, over-zealous wait-staff.  Regardless, it’s a safe bet because anywhere else, and you might accidentally find yourself eating actual English food.

The pubs are plentiful, roughly one every eight inches — each outdoing the other with garish light fixtures, room-temperature beer, the kind of wall-paper usually associated with blind great-grandmothers, and names circuitously referring to genitalia; The Cock & Cootch, The Gallic Bullocks, Vag. They are thick with an olde-world charm.  A charm that millions of pubs have tried to replicate around the world but have never fully succeeded in doing. 

Just like London, because there’s only one London, and it’s here.

...  Right adjacent to Jellyteethbingstead.

Authors note: I originally wrote the diamond thing thinking it come from my own brain — as I usually do. I just recalled that i’m wrong, it came from the great Dave Barry’s brain.

Dad's 65th

Firstly, I’d like to welcome both sides of my family to this gathering for my dad’s 65^th birthday. I have to say this is probably stranger for me than it is for you. Part of it is because I only recently became able to understand half of my family, and the other half spoke Dutch. Mostly, though, it’s strange to see both sides of your genetic disposition in such enormous numbers. 

By the way, you can easily identify the Dutch people among you because they are the one’s congratulating you on my father’s birthday. I’ve always found this a little strange because it is, in fact, his birthday. He’s the one that made it to 65, so stop stealing his thunder by congratulating other people. 

I often wonder if this are one of the things that caused him to leave the shores of Holland almost 40 years ago to make a life for himself in this country. The specifics of his exodus, however, remain not entirely clear considering his Dutch relatives are very nice people, and Ottawa is boring as hell. It’s also not entirely clear how he feels about a son that returned to the same place he was trying to escape from in the first place.

These are the larger questions I’ve had about his life. It’s weird that I have questions at all considering that, as of this birthday, I’ve known him for more than half of his.

Interestingly I  Googled “65 years old” and the first thing that came up was the Wikipedia entry for “Old age”. Further reading of this entry brings you to psychologist Erik Erikson and his "Eight Stages of Life" theory. Apparently the stage my dad’s in is the one characterized by "Integrity vs. Despair". during which a person focuses on reflecting back on their life. Somehow I don’t see my dad reflecting much on his life. So I thought I might reflect on his life on his behalf.

This will be in the form of My Dad’s Life Rules based on his past experiences, and my observations of him.

1)   You are the smartest person in the room no matter who you’re in the room with. If there is  a possibility that you may be wrong, bend your immediate reality to fit into your belief system.

2)    Ogling women is only successful as long as everyone near you feels uncomfortable by the intensity at which you ogle them. This can be done by extensively staring at a woman’s cleavage while giving them non-committal answers to any discussion you may be having.

3)    The amount of concentration devoted to reading rises in direct proportion to the amount that someone wants to get you attention. Theoretically if my father ever fought in war he would do his best reading under sustained fire.

4)    Babies are great unless they’re your own. If by accident you have your own baby, treat them with disdain and apprehension until you can beat them repeatedly at chess.

5)    Continuing from number 4. It’s not enough to beat your child at any game. It’s necessary to totally bury them with your superior tactical strategy to the point where they are reduced to tears of anger and frustration. Then, offer to play them again, and then when they finally agree, destroy them. Repeat as necessary.

6)    Your native language is best expressed in a sudden loudly yelled string of curse words, particularly when you injure yourself.

7)    Cursing is generally used when you receive head and thumb injuries, however, it is also acceptable when you decide to surf down a set of stairs on your brother’s laptop.

8)    Anybody that says picking their nose is a hobby is badly mistaken. It is a career choice and a way of life. There is no shame in picking it in public places and flicking it at the nearest corner.

9)    Jokes and Anecdotes are like Chinese food. It gets better each time you reheat it and retell it.

1    You can dance if you want to, you can leave your friends behind, cause if your friends can’t dance, and if they don’t dance, then they’re no friends of mine.

11) Cooking food is not an art, it’s a process of meticulous engineering. That being said, instincts have no part in cooking food. Set the timer for every single process. This not only determines precisely when the lamb cutlets should be turned, but also induces Pavlovian hunger and malice for anybody waiting to eat.

12) Names are not important especially if they are your Son’s girlfriends. This relates to rule number one, in that if you called your son’s girlfriend his previous girlfriend’s name – or a name you simply invented -- it’s their fault because they don’t have the correct name anyway.

13) Bowel movements are a moment of intense celebration. You, after all, have accomplished something great. Each bowel movement should be accompanied by a warrior cry, as if you have slain your worst enemy.

14) A few words about love: If you find that you are falling in love with someone, you must absolutely remember this one important thing: mbmbmbmlbmbmblbmbmbl

15) It’s absolutely fine to drive long distances with you left turn signal on, even though you plan on making no left turns.

16) Genetics have nothing to do with hair loss, it’s all about using Johnson’s baby shampoo religiously.

17) Along the same lines, using a comb is a sign of weakness.

Now this all may seem like criticisms, and they are. But I believe these last three make up for it.

18) It’s the little things that bug him. The big things, that would make anyone else panic and become hysterical, are the ones that make him focus. The man has the most coolest head in a difficult situation I’ve ever met. In short, when faced with difficulty, and life it beating you down, don’t panic. Stop and figure on a solution.

19) I have never heard the man ever say an unkind word about anybody. Ever. Stop and think about that for a second. He is totally non-judgemental. He simply doesn’t hate. He takes everybody at face value. So, try not to judge people.

20) He wants to help you. If you are within his scope of perception, even if you’re on the periphery he wants to assist you somehow. He wants to solve your problem, help you build something, find a better way for you to do something. I am convinced that almost everyone around here tonight has been helped by him in one way or another. And it’s generally been something big. If it hasn’t happened yet it’s because you haven’t been around  him long enough

This last point is quite important when you consider that I’ve been around him my whole life either physically or mentally. It makes me a very lucky man indeed. And dad, I thank you for that.

Happy Birthday dad, ik hou van je.

de taal

This is not an actual blog, just a short description of something that happened to me the other day.

My Dad skyped (yes, a new verb) me on Sunday to catch up a bit.  Occasionally we'll switch over to Dutch to exercise my third language skills.  The conversation turned to members of our family; what they were doing, how they were doing, where they were doing it.  It turns out that my uncle — his brother-in-law — suffered a pretty bad stroke.  Well, all, strokes are pretty bad, and as far as strokes go this wasn’t a total power-grid failure.  It seems the fuse was only blown in a few bits, like the one’s responsible for communication.  My dad said, “Ben is really struggling to speak English.  As a matter of fact, he has great difficulty even with his vocabulary in Dutch.  You can hear him fighting  to find the words.”

I said, “It sounds like we’re on about the same level then, speaking Dutch.  I should practice with him.”

Dad said, “No, he’s still doing slightly better than you.”

So, if you're wondering how well I speak Dutch, I'm slightly below the level of a stroke victim.

My Dad: 36 years of useful criticism.   

"Literary!!!", he muttered.

The urge to write now comes at about 4am.  This is inconvenient,  but doable.

Nothing is more tragic than watching Czech people dance.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve been to clubs in the Czech Republic and been flummoxed by how random the limbs were moving in relation to the beat.  And, I know, it’s a hell of a thing to criticize if you yourself are no Baryshnikov; but seeing a beautiful Czech lady studiously trying to move sexily, while coming off like two penguins in a foot-race, can leave a man confused.

I blame it on the lack of black culture.  This came to me when I was watching a group of white people try to keep a simple rhythm with their hands.  The only thing funnier than the person clapping off the beat while trying desperately to be on the beat, is the look of unbridled joy when a bunch of white people actually pull off a few claps in unison.

The way I figure it, the ability  to informally dance (as opposed to ballroom dance, belly dance, or Riverdance) increases in direct proportion to a society’s historical exposure to black, or darkly complected people.  And yes, the stereotype is as glaring as white-people dancing is hilarious.

So what’s the excuse for bad literature?

Again, this is coming from a place where the critic is no literary genius himself.   I am by no means a masterful weaver of words like Julian Barnes, Elmore Leonard, P.J. O’Rourke, or even Dave Barry.  However, I read —if you’re familiar with the unit of measurement — “a fuckload”.  So without further ado, here’s a few of my pet peeves:

Recently I was watching the Disney CGI film Tangled — at least the first ten minutes before the characters burst into song.  When this happened I literally leaped across the room, brought the mouse to bear on the “stop” icon, and checked myself before throwing my computer against the wall in disgust.   Here’s the thing: I like music (I don’t, however, like whiny music), and I like animated features, but being badly surprised by song —in something I thought was songless— is worse than discovering that the chocolates are raisins in your chocolate-chip cookie.   When I hear singing, when I don’t expect to hear singing, I feel the urge to do horrible things to nice people.  This goes for sporting events, bars, and yes, films.

I feel the same way when I suddenly encounter poetry in a novel — or poetry cleverly disguised as a song, for that matter.  There are poets, and there are writers of pros.  There is very rarely both at the same time.  I've only actually seen it done successfully by one guy, Kevin Colgan.  Without getting too deep into the relative merit of each, I should make it clear that I pretty much don’t get poetry. I just know when it’s bad.  Leonard Cohen, for example; great poet, terrible novelist.  Beautiful Losers was one of the most banal, badly-written books I have ever read.  Tolkein, had a habit of lapsing into poetic verse without the slightest warning.  There you are, Frodo has perilously moved his Baggins to the crest of Mount Dimpletwat, you turn the page, and.  .  .  what?  A friggin’ three-page poem about the observable vista across the Valley of Quidditch.  Just tell me the story, man.  Don’t wax on to yourself about the mighty tower/ with eye that glowers.  Never once have I read a poem in a novel that added to the plot in any way.  At best, the author comes off as a fatuous jerk, at worst it’s like discovering a flattened, dried, bug carcass between the pages. 

I used to believe that people that use more than one exclamation point are mentally retarded.  Somewhere along the line, in my crotchety, bitter state, I have come to believe that people that use any exclamation points are mentally retarded.  Am I going too far with my fascist punctuation ideas?  Especially for someone that’s terrible at using them?  I just feel that very few sentences are so exciting that they warrant an exclamation point.  I put exclamation point users in the same category as people that use emoticons ( 8==> ): they have sponge for brains, or they’re girls up to the age of eighteen — which nearly amounts to the same thing.  I suppose I don’t like being told I should be excited about something.  A good sentence (or a tame sentence, but in a good context) should be able to convey the necessary excitement on its own.  Even in dialogue it should be used sparingly in short statements, otherwise you get: “Marty, get down from the top shelf when you’re going to try to steal cookies, otherwise the fall from that height may cause you to break your head and make it necessary to mop up blood and brain matter before heading to the hospital, which I don’t want to do because hospitals smell of iodine, and I hate the smell of iodine!” I picture exclamation points as tiny little crutches used both by the reader and author to convince each other that something interesting just happened.

This is highly controversial, but I also feel the same about words other than “said” to indicate that someone is speaking.   This is a bit of a tricky one, but the same rule can apply; if you have to use a colourful expressions to describe how the person is saying something, either you haven’t contextualized the statement enough, or you’re trying to sell something that isn’t there.  Sure I’ll accept the odd “whispered” or “yelled”, but when we start getting into “complained”, and “snarled”, and “griped”, and even “enquired”, and, of course “sang” (when the person is clearly not singing, and if they are, you're annoying me with your poetry again) I start to doubt the author’s actual ability.  This tends to happen in cheap thrillers a lot:

“Hey.  Hey!  Did you shoot Jim?” Jeff growled.

“I had to, he had the master-code to the Omega System.” grimaced Mike.

“Well, you know, if he dies, you die.” seethed Jeff.

“You just try it.” Mike challenged

“Maybe, I will.” Jeff snarled.

“Oh, yeah?” enquired Mike.

“Oh.  Yeah.” whispered Jeff.

“Well, take one step closer—“ mewed Mike.

“I already have!” Jeff spat.

“Ugh, do you have a towel?” Mike wondered.

“Kiss me first.” muttered Jeff.

And so, on and so forth.

Okay, here’s the thing about stories within stories: The quality of that story is only as good as the skill of the author producing it.   Telling me, “And he regaled me with a tale of such stupendous mystery.  I was so awed by its magnificent profundity I quite shat myself.” does not automatically induce the same reaction in the reader.  Unless that reader is easily amused, or simple.  That means; don’t tell me that the story your character heard, or witnessed, is amazing, just tell me the damn story.  If you have to tell your audience that what they are about to hear, or have heard, requires scaffolding to put their jaw back in place, you are probably telling (or have told) a shitty story.  The same goes for the listener’s reactions within the story, unless that story wasn’t explicitly told: “Jeff told us a story that scared the crap out of us.” works.  “Jeff began to tell us this story: (insert long story about hats here).  Afterwards we all sat in stupefied silence, some of us moved to tears.” does not.

The same goes for supposedly humorous statements.   Saying, “Everyone around the table laughed”, or, “The room filled with laughter at his comment”, or, “What he was about to do made some people laugh so hard they vomited”, means you are obligated to write something that’s actually funny.  Cueing your readers for laughter in this way,  without producing amusing material, is the equivalent to laugh-tracks in bad sitcoms.  Unless you expect your audience to be sheared every spring to make warm sweaters, you are asking paper airplanes to land on runways designed for 747s.  I’m particularly sensitive to this because it’s hard to write funny material.  Trust me, I’ve been trying (with varying degrees of failure) for years.  It takes a special kind of verbal intuition, timing, and execution to get it right.  So if you come along and fake it by explaining that this is the point when the audience is expected to laugh, I will call you a hack and punch you in the throat if I ever meet you in person.  No joke.

Also, I am no longer sure of the viability of the word “that”. I see it a bit like my removed appendix: I probably didn’t need it anyway. This is more a personal taste thing, like: “He was sure that he left the keys on his desk”, as opposed to, “He was sure he left the keys on his desk” Hmmm, you can stare at these two sentences until your eyeballs rupture and not be convinced that (or not “that”) one is better than the other. What is totally unacceptable, however, is two or more “that”s together: “He indicated that that key was the one he left on the desk.” I mean seriously people, a quarter-million words in the English language and you start doubling up on the dodgy ones?

I think a lot of these complaints I have can be boiled down to one very simple thing: Don’t treat your audience like sycophantic morons.  Unless that's your target demographic (which is growing in inverse proportion to the polar ice-caps melting) treat them like they at least have a couple brain-cells which communicate with each other to create a thought.  This means ease off on the use of description — and if you insist on copiously smearing your wondrous and varied thesaurus-based vocabulary like rich golden butter across the tableau of your morning darkened toast, try not to emit a constant stream of clichés.  Don’t perpetuate the dumb, like so many other mediums are trying to do.

In conclusion:

Something funny.