Commedia del Amsterdam…

this is from another network which should contain this blog within it. a meta-network designed to bring us all under one digital roof so to speak. this is being written on june 11, 07 whereas below is june 5th.
Often people ask me why i live here. the answer is easy for a beta-male: no nutter ready to hammer your head in for no reason at the slightest excuse. The dutch have a phrase for it: ‘doe normaal, dan doe je al gek genoeg’, which translates as, ‘do normal then you’re doing crazy enough’. In my experience of the world this is sound advice. a bit boring perhaps, but safe from harm. not that i haven’t met nutters here in amsterdam, though mostly harmless and benign. the important thing is that they are tolerated.

so tolerance is on my list, as well as lack of violence. every self-respecting nerd is basically safe here. i’m a Shakespeare nerd. this saturday my arch-enemies in terms of accepting Shhh as himself and not some other e.g. an ORKsfordian, or any other ‘precious’ whose gifts have been hidden in the mists of time until some looney picked up the tune hundreds of years later and started to sing it falsely. Tolerance is required of me.

These anti-shakespeare people are no fools, nor misguided, except in their conclusions, based on little that stands up in a court of law; no matter how they spin it. the stratfrodo-ians put on tea, curl up their hairy feet and plug their ears to their assailants constant clamouring. they read the words discreetly, imagining whatever

There is no answer satisfactory to us all. ‘the better part of valour is discretion’. HIV pt 1 act v. sc. 1.

Discretion and discernment are qualities that the Dutch possess in very small measure in public. they can be blunt and tactless to an excrucitating degree. but in business they tend to be paragons of circumspection. they ride the long tail in our western societies. have done so since the beginning. This is my final reason for living here. there is a continuity of visible and tangible history since the time Shhh lived. I like that.

posted by ishakespeare on Tuesday, June 05 2007 permalink | comments (0)