Found Objects

There are lots of street magazines in the Netherlands, sold (and often produced) by homeless people, like The Big Issue in the United Kingdom and elsewhere: Z Magazine in Amsterdam, De Zelfkrant in Den Bosch, Haags Straatnieuws in The Hague, De Riepe (which is Groninger dialect for “The Sidewalk”) in the North, Straatjournaal in Haarlem (no website, but a big presence in the local news), Straatmagazine Leiden in Leiden, Straatmagazine in Rotterdam and Straatnieuws, the oldest street magazine of the Netherlands, in Utrecht, Amersfoort and Hilversum. In Arnhem, Nijmegen, Doetinchem and Apeldoorn there used to be Impuls, but it folded in July 2007 for lack of vendors; probably a good thing, because it means that fewer people are homeless.

Whenever I find myself in one of those towns I buy a copy. In Utrecht, if possible, from the same vendor every time, a friendly stick-thin man who stands at one of the exits of the station area. I don’t give money to beggars on principle, but if someone is making a real effort —whether playing music, drawing chalk sidewalk pictures or selling street magazines— I usually contribute.

Our town doesn’t have a street magazine, worse luck. Probably because nobody can set it up, or there are no starting funds, rather than for lack of people who could sell it, judging by the number of likely suspects I see in the streets. (This may be skewed by the fact that we live very close to the local homeless facility, but I think there are a few dozen at least.).

Instead, we have Het Daklozenwoord. It may look like a street magazine on first sight, but it doesn’t quite quack like one: it’s run by Eastern European gangs, it may be sold by people who are technically homeless, but as far as I (or at least my sources) can find out they don’t get to keep any of the proceeds. And the vendors I’ve met —a whole family of them, taking turns at the door of my usual supermarket— weren’t very friendly, but saying “Daaklozenkraant! Asseblief! Dankoewel!” in a whiny voice, ever more insistently, even to the same person who has said “no” three times in a row in the last five minutes. I wish those people would stick to making music; they do that too, and not at all badly.

And any guilt-induced impulse to give them the benefit of the doubt was quashed forever when I saw the only female member of that family —a girl of around twenty— carefully set her face to “pitiful” before taking up her pile of papers.

A tiny one-paragraph bit in our paper, but here’s a more elaborate article from the International Herald Tribune: Sweden is about to outlaw the teaching of religion outside religious-education lessons in private schools. In public schools there’s already no teaching of religion, I suppose.

It sounds like a refreshing change from the school my kids are in, where lots of things are taught in religious-education lessons, very few of them having much to do with religion. But that’s not the point: the point is, apparently, to protect students from fundamentalism. Christian fundamentalism, as the larger article makes clear and the tiny bit in the paper didn’t. Keeping people ignorant keeps them innocent? That’s never worked before. In fact, fundamentalism often springs from ignorance.

Read more ...

That was my first thought when I got the paper out of the letterbox this morning. The next thought was that it should have been “Eek! The paper is wrong!”

Trouw has gone tabloid. And however many quality papers in the world have gone tabloid before, tabloid format still means “a rag” to me, not a real newspaper.

Read more ...

Trouw has a weekly comic, Het Dagboek van Anton Dingeman (Anton Dingeman’s Diary), a Day in the Life of a Civil Servant thing, ranging from boring to hilariously funny, with occasional peaks of high satire. Unfortunately, it’s not online.

Monday, January 19, was one of those high points. For copyright reasons, I can’t scan and display the whole thing, but I’ll give the text in translation.

Read more ...