J.W. Burleson photo / Boquillas del Carmen, Coah.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Arte povera at the Kroller Muller
Saw an exhibition of Italian artists--Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gilberto Zorio, Guiseepe Penone--who were, sort of, members of the arte povera circle/movement in the 1970s up at the Kroller Muller museum in The Netherlands yesterday.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
The Dutch Bicycle in Nijmegen.
They even have a couple hills in this part of the country. Doesn't stop anyone biking. The NL is a nation on (2) wheels. The classic Dutch cycle is an Omafiets or Opafiets---this isn't a make of bike, but a type of classic bike, in (oma)female (grandama) and male (grandpa) versions. Also known as a 'sit up and beg' bike, which is more or less the position of the rider. Gotta keep your head up, biking in Holland. Lots of traffic, no helmets, but bikes rule, and bike paths are basically everywhere.
≈
une autre Citroën DS, puis une Chevy wagon
I'm back in the Netherlands, where there is definitely an automotive subculture devoted to the classic voiture francaise. And another, devoted to the large American bomber.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Nijmegen. And why is Maine afraid of modernism?
I am glad to be back in The Netherlands this week. After six months at NIAS in the fall and winter, this feels a bit like coming home. I'm at Nijmegen to speak at the 1st Global Legacies of the Irish Famine conference. (My first novel, The Law of Dreams, was set during the Famine period. But it's fiction, and most of the people at the conference are historians, anthropologists, and literary and cultural theorists. May be a tough audience...we shall see. Meanwhile it's fun to be in NL with a bunch of Irish people. The crack is good.)
Never have been in this part of the NL before. Coming from Zuid-Holland, it seems shockingly...hilly. By Dutch standards, anyway. Bikes everywhere nonetheless. The city is on the Rhine: I've been watching the barge traffic, which is intense. This is the Catholic zone of the NL, culturally quite different than the north of the country. It is a beautiful city. One of the things that struck me today is how unafraid the Dutch are of modernism.
In Maine, we are often so timid about the new. Our banks are built to look like swollen versions of "traditional"summer houses. Macdonald's restaurants go all faux-colonial. Every commercial interior within a mile of LL Bean at Freeport seems hung with old snowshoes, old boots, and other Maine-cliché paraphernalia.
Perhaps the Dutch have a solid enough grasp on their history that they don't need to be ceaselessly reconstructing it in lamer & lamer versions.
Much of Nijmegan was pulverized duirng WWII but the architecture I've been looking at this morning, in the city 'centrum', seems to date from the last 15 years or so. I expect some earlier post-war rebuilding was taken out by the new stuff. (A lot of war-damaged areas in NL were rather hastily and poorly rebuilt in the 1950s, and much of that has been replaced with more interesting work done the last couple of decades.)
The NL were held captive by the Spanish Habsburg empire until the 17th c., and the influence probably hung on longer in the Catholic regions. I thought I detected Spanish/Moorish influence in bits and pieces of Nijmegen.
Never have been in this part of the NL before. Coming from Zuid-Holland, it seems shockingly...hilly. By Dutch standards, anyway. Bikes everywhere nonetheless. The city is on the Rhine: I've been watching the barge traffic, which is intense. This is the Catholic zone of the NL, culturally quite different than the north of the country. It is a beautiful city. One of the things that struck me today is how unafraid the Dutch are of modernism.
In Maine, we are often so timid about the new. Our banks are built to look like swollen versions of "traditional"summer houses. Macdonald's restaurants go all faux-colonial. Every commercial interior within a mile of LL Bean at Freeport seems hung with old snowshoes, old boots, and other Maine-cliché paraphernalia.
Perhaps the Dutch have a solid enough grasp on their history that they don't need to be ceaselessly reconstructing it in lamer & lamer versions.
Much of Nijmegan was pulverized duirng WWII but the architecture I've been looking at this morning, in the city 'centrum', seems to date from the last 15 years or so. I expect some earlier post-war rebuilding was taken out by the new stuff. (A lot of war-damaged areas in NL were rather hastily and poorly rebuilt in the 1950s, and much of that has been replaced with more interesting work done the last couple of decades.)
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