On 30 April Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands will be inaugurated as king of the country.

The government decided on three things to mark the occasion: a book of dreams, King’s Games for elementary school pupils and a King’s Song. The latter would be written by accomplished song smith John Ewbank based on verses people from all over the kingdom had sent in via Twitter and other channels.

The Moderate Voice says of the result:

The King’s Song is, in my opinion, a delightful mix of musical genres — including traditional Dutch music and (Dutch) rap — lyrics and video contributed by Dutch artists and citizens alike and put together and performed by a score of Holland’s finest artists and musicians. It displays the diversity and the beauty of today’s Dutch people, it reflects — in the lyrics — Dutch history, traditions and struggles, such as the constant fight against the sea and the vocals are soft and melodic — something that can be difficult to accomplish with the somewhat guttural Dutch language.

Problem is, the Dutch people don’t like the song! Tens of thousands of people have signed a petition that says—in jest, one presumes and hopes—that they will renounce their citizenship if the government persists in its unholy idea to have the song sung to the prince. Linguists were dragged into the spotlight to highlight the many ills of the song; then other linguists stepped up and said there is nothing wrong with the song—linguistically speaking.

Meanwhile hateful messages aimed at Ewbank kept piling up on Twitter and at some point the author of a record number of 18 Dutch number one hits decided to withdraw the song, leaving behind a flabbergasted country—how does one withdraw a song?

So what are these mistakes Ewbank supposedly made? For one thing the song is incredibly schmaltzy. In it, the prince protects citizens against the elements—”I will build a dyke with my bare hands and will keep you away from the water”—or the other way around, the whole thing is unclear. Keeping the Dutch away from water; has the narrator gone mad?

In my opinion the problem with the song is that it is just not beautiful. You could argue whether this is due to shaky grammar, ambiguous language or to trite metaphors, or even all of the above. The song feels like Ewbank phoned it in and my guess is that a broad section of the population felt the same way.

The sentence that is the banner for all who dislike the song and that has been parodied countless times the past few days is “de dag die je wist dat zou komen is eindelijk hier”. Translated literally it means “the day you knew that would come has finally arrived.” It’s not grammatically wrong, but it uses such an unusual construction that it makes the brain sit up and pay attention to the grammar of the song all of a sudden.

Saying that the people’s objections are about grammar helps to make the problem quantifiable. You can drag linguists in front of TV lights and have them say “this, then.” And if you are a talentless newspaper columnist, it helps you in blaming a nebulous ‘cultural elite’ who ‘obviously’ care more about how a song is spelled than what it tries to express.

And what if you’re the minister responsible for this mess? Jet Bussemaker, Minister for Education, unwithdrew* the song yesterday and declared it shall be sung to the new king, but with any grammatical errors removed. Later a spokesperson for the minister said she had meant it as a joke, NRC reports.

You can find the song at YouTube.

*) Yes, I have to make up words just so that I can tell you what’s going on.

Ray Kluun has stopped blogging … for now.

The author of Love Life keeps being bombarded with ridiculously high copyright claims over images that he naïvely had been plucking off Google Images in the past to adorn his postings.

In a message that replaces his blog’s frontpage he explains:

Bloggers who borrowed from Google Images in the past have been declared outlawed. Unfortunately I (and many others with me) only found this out recently. All of this has cost me thousands of euros and lots of irritation. Of course I have stopped publishing photos [on this blog] for this reason.

It is however pretty much impossible to remove all photos that I have added to postings on kluun.nl since 2003. I would have to check thousands of articles and remove the photos one by one.

Basic legal tenets, such as the right to a fair trial and the right to a punishment proportional to the wrongdoing have been thrown out the window in the Netherlands in the past few years where it comes to intellectual property. There is an entire cottage industry of so-called copyright trolls who scour the web for infringements. If they find one, the send out bills ten times the price of the license or more. These companies even have their own go-to court, the one of The Hague, where especially judge Chris Hensen is a good friend of the copyright industry.

(Illustration: screenshot of Kluun’s website)

On February 10, Dutch animation director Erik-Jan de Boer won a BAFTA award (British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the British version of the Oscars) for the visual effects he co-created for the film Life of Pi, directed by Taiwanese-born American film director Ang Lee.

De Boer is also co-nominated for an Oscar award for his work on Life of Pi, a film based on the novel by French Canadian author Yann Martel. The Oscars will be presented on 24 February, 2013.

Watch the international trailer:

(Link: www.dutchdailynews.com, Photo of Tiger by ArranET, some rights reserved)

On 27 July 1668 lawyer, doctor and libertarian wunderkind Adriaan Koerbagh was convicted for heresy. His crime? Writing and publishing a dictionary* two years earlier.

Koerbagh was a religious man, but he held no truck with (too much) superstition. A thing that irritated him was the use of foreign (Greek or Latin) words in the Bible to obfuscate their often simple meanings. In his dictionary he pointed out that ‘angel’ merely meant ‘messenger’, that ‘devil’ meant ‘slanderer’ (“the devil was invented by theologians**”) and that Jesus Christ ought to be called Jesus the Anointed. He felt that theologians, lawyers and doctors used foreign words on purpose to keep the common man from seeing through their dogmas.

According to Pim den Boer, Koerbagh was the first Dutchman to publicly denounce miracles: “Theologians claim that a miracle is something that stands above nature or goes against it, but that is not true, because nothing can be above nature or go against it.”

In 1993 lexicographer Ewout Sanders published an anthology of Koerbagh’s dictionary, but now DBNL.org has published the whole thing. It is not clear to me if the book is still forbidden.

About the Bible Koerbagh wrote: “If the word would no longer be protected by fire and sword, it would deteriorate in no time.” The author would feel the force of that fire and sword. Two years after his conviction he died in prison at the age of 37.

*) Titled A Flower Garden Full of Loveliness Without Sadness.

**) I should point out that the common Dutch word for theologian, theoloog, is also derived from Greek. Koerbagh of course uses the Germanic form godsgeleerde.

(Link: Marc van Oostendorp)

Presenter Frénk van der Linden of the arts and culture radio show Kunststof asked composer Tom America to do ‘something’ with the past 2,000 episodes, and the result was a CD full of songs that revolve around short phrases uttered by the interviewed.

The CD was released sometime in May, and is available for free from the broadcaster’s website.

Tom America was one of the driving forces between the absurdist band MAM, which performed in pyjamas and sung songs about cheese inspired by Picasso.

(Photo: NTR / Job, Joris & Marieke. Link: Moors Magazine.)

This year is the 100th birthday of Marten Toonder, the godfather of the Dutch comic, and many events and publications mark the occasion, such as De Toonder Animatiefilms, a comprehensive history of the Toonder Studios’ animations.

The book by Jan-Willem de Vries contains over 500 illustrations and includes a DVD with many of the films.

Holly Moors says about the book:

The DVD contains quite a number of commercial animations [...], but the films [that the studio made for itself] are by far the most interesting. Among them De Gouden Vis [The Golden Fish---Branko], a beautiful, quiet animation with wonderful Oriental looking artwork, magnificently subtle colouring and a rather vague, Oriental story.

[...]

The entire DVD turns out to be a treasure trove of such surprises.

Toonder (1912 – 2005) was mostly known for his comics though, and his flagship strip was the Tom Puss/Oliver B. Bumble series.

After Belgian comics creator Hergé (Tintin) had introduced text balloons for speech, most European comics artists adopted that style. Toonder however stuck to comics that looked more like illustrated texts, which allowed him to fully explore his literary style. That style, combined with the use of fables to parody Dutch society must have made him hard to translate, yet he was one of the very few Dutch comics authors who saw success abroad.

Several of his neologisms are used to this day in the Dutch language:

• Minkukel: an inferior person.
• Zielknijper: psychiatrist, literally ‘soul pincher’ (i.e. analogous to ‘head shrinker’).
• Grootgrutter: supermarket, literally ‘large-scale grocery’.
• Denkraam: something like intellect, but also frame of reference and paradigm, literally ‘thought window’.

A lot of writers who later became famous in their right worked for Toonder Studios, such as Lo Hartog van Banda, Paul Biegel, Thé Tjong King, Piet Wijn, Dick Matena and Jan Kruis,

(Illustration: still from The Dragon That Wasn’t, the first Dutch feature animation film.)

Although it has been around for two years, the Schiphol Airport Library deserves more exposure, especially since it offers a free service, something that you’d be hard pressed to find at any airport. English Breakfast radio in Amsterdam interviewed head librarian Jeanine Deckers who explained that Singapore’s Airport also started up a library, based on the one at Schiphol.

The library takes up a 90 m2 space and is located in the non-Schengen area, past security, near the Rijksmuseum (State Museum) area. It features about 1,250 books, including translated Dutch fiction in 30 languages, photo books, videos and music on iPads. They don’t offer the most recent books, which is fine with the book sellers at the airport. People also donate books to the library, which apparently more than makes up for the few books that are not returned. The library is also open 24/7 and doesn’t need any staff.

This means that I have walked passed it numerous times without knowing it was there, and that I will try and check it out this month when I walk by it once more. My excuse is not having any layovers at Schiphol; I usually have those in London or Paris.

(Links: www.airportlibrary.nl, www.englishbreakfast.nl)

In the Rotterdam suburb Capelle aan den IJssel, a new neighbourhood was built in 2001 called Fascinatio, named after the children’s book ‘Fascinatio de wonderwind’ by Tom Manders. It prides itself on being a great place for kids to grow up in, go to school and play.

One of the street names is Flatusstraat, also from the book, which is a fancy way of saying ‘Fart Street’. Although the street has been around for a decade, it made the kids’ news a few days ago because grown ups would like to see it changed and journalist grown ups seemed to have run out of children’s stories.

There are actually worse names for streets in the Netherlands: Eendekotsweg (‘Duck Vomit Street’), Poepershoek (‘Shitters’ Corner’) and Windgat (‘Wind Hole’), to name a few.

(Link: jeugdjournaal.nl, Photo of Tom Manders by FaceMePLS, some rights reserved)

First, there was the banning of a poem about a teenage boy’s SS uncle deemed inappropriate to be read at the annual Amsterdam ceremony, now the town of Vorden, Gelderland, which has one of the only graves in the Netherlands with German soldiers buried in it that wants to commemorate them. Basically, it’s fashionable to blur the lines between victim and perpetrator: it’s cool to be on the wrong side of things. And there’s so much bad taste going around these days, you need to pick your battles.

The Remembrance of the Dead on 4 May is to commemorate civilians and soldiers of all kinds who died in WWII, Dutch or foreign, but since the 1960s it has also included other wars and major conflicts. The boy’s poem was also meant to commemorate a Dutch volunteer who ended up on the wrong side of things, but after much commotion from Jewish organisations and the public at large, it was pulled. The teenager did well in winning a contest with his poem, but it’s too bad he’s being dragged in the mud for it. Only one line of the poem points to the man being on the German side, it’s not a big pro-Nazi rant or anything.

However, paying tribute to German soldiers flat out is losing the plot in my opinion. Or amnesia. Or dementia.

Orangemaster and I celebrated Queen’s Day together today, as we so often do, and we even brought friend and blogger Jeroen Mirck along to share in the fun of hunting for literature and music on what surely must be the greatest garage sale in the world.

Just walking around our neighbourhood took us hours, but it paid off in books and singles and CDs.

Until yesterday every day of the year had been either cold or overcast, today Amsterdam was bathed in sunlight and warmth, which made up for the entire dreary month of April in my view.

Here’s a very short photo impression, more should show up on our Flickr account in a few hours.

Update: I have uploaded the Queen’s Day set to Flickr.