He keeps coming to my attention by a kind of serial serendipity. Jaap de Berg wrote in the language column of Trouw basically what I wrote in 2008, prompted by a news item in another paper about President Obama: “as if he were a modern-day Hansje Brinker, able to do heroic work with one finger kilometers under water”. Here is a link; may not persist, may disappear behind a paywall after some finite amount of time, may be behind a paywall even now. If you can’t see the article and you want to read it (in Dutch, of course), please communicate.

This made me look up the Wikipedia article, which turns out to be surprisingly good and complete. And of course, there’s a non-zero chance that the boy with his finger in the dike —if, which I doubt, he existed at all— was also called Hans, or rather Hannes.

(Also, a student wants to quote my names deconstruction; recognition at last!)

Yesterday on BBC News I read the story of a man who was abandoned and adopted as a baby and is now trying to find out what exactly happened. (One of the strangest things is that when the police arrived at the block of flats where he’d been found, several people were standing around him on the cold concrete floor and nobody had picked him up.)

A sentence struck my eye: “The social morays at the time looked down on unmarried mothers.” …morays? Aren’t those the eels with all the teeth?

When you swim in the sea
and an eel bites your knee,
that’s a moray.

But then these are social morays, so probably apt to be more judgmental.

They’ve changed it now, of course, rather a pity. But how could it have happened? I don’t suspect the spell checker (check: mine knows both ‘mores’ and ‘morays’). Either someone didn’t know how to spell ‘mores’ or, more likely and more hilarious, someone used dictation software, pronounced it correctly, and the program picked the wrong homophone.

There’s a statue of the boy with his finger in the dyke in Spaarndam. According to this rather good article about Hans Brinker, it was placed there “in order to please the American tourists”, who all wanted to see exactly where the boy had put his finger in the dyke. Also, I recommend reading past the pictures of the statue in the first link.

(Here is my earlier post about Hans Brinker)

This is part 2 of the Hans Brinker review, with the names deconstruction.

If you’re actually using this page as a resource —I decided to split the blog post in two when I suddenly realised that some people might want to do that— please comment or mail to tell me if you’d prefer the names to be ordered thematically or alphabetically instead.

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I don’t know what prompted it [ETA: a daughter trying to keep a beer bottle from squirting by plugging it with her finger], but I read Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates. And couldn’t stop reading it once I was underway, though it’s very dated (that figures; it was published in 1865) and it kept me wishing I had a time machine so I could go and be Mary Mapes Dodge’s copy editor, because she badly needed one. It’s surprisingly gripping.

Note that Hans Brinker is not the name of the boy with his finger in the dike. It’s a story-in-the-story in this book. That story is not, and never has been, something that every Dutch child knows; it’s only known in the Netherlands from translations and retellings of Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates. I shudder to think that whole generations of children in the United States had most of their knowledge of the Netherlands from this book alone. No wonder so many tourists arrive with serious misconceptions.

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Because there was no handy bus to where I wanted to go. Also, it was splendid weather for a bike ride, sunny and crisp but not too cold.

Or, alternatively, I decided on the bike because that’s where I happened to be when I made the decision to write what I’m writing now, rather than in a seat near the front of the No. 5 bus to Colmschate.

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I know someone who, like us, doesn’t have TV, but unlike us she doesn’t read newspapers either. She says it’s a very restful existence. She may be right, but I couldn’t do that: when I go without news for a few weeks, for instance on holiday, I do crave a paper. I often buy a foreign paper when I’m abroad, both to read the local language and see what people in that country find interesting and important.

There seems to be more and more silliness in the papers, though. And on online news sites too. Perhaps it’s only because I’ve been reading more critically lately.

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Foundations for Christian Education by John L. Boojamra. A friendly priest gave it to me years ago, I dimly remember skimming it at the time, I’m now reading it for Lent.

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I felt that I ought to read more Real Literature, but I balk at Dostojevskij, so I went in search of Jane Austen (who seems to be the author whose fiction I am). That’s on the English Literature shelf, and what I found there instead was The Prisoner of Zenda. I faintly remembered reading that years and years ago, or at least starting to read it or wanting to read it, so I took it out (most of the Eng.Lit. is over the living-room door) and couldn’t put it back until I’d finished it.

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