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2 juli 2005

Naked girls

Peter Breedveld

Bing-xin2 (78k image)

I discovered this new website, one of the most fascinating sites I ever came across. It’s called I shot myself . It’s a site with naked girls. I know, there are naked girls aplenty on the internet. But this site is different. The girls are not professional models, or porn stars, or Eastern European or Philippine unmarried mothers desperately trying to make ends meet.

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26 maart 2005

The cradle of Dutch pop music

Peter Breedveld

FNTielman3 (212k image)
The Tielman Brothers

Why was The Hague the capital of Dutch pop music in the sixties? Probably due to a combination of Indo-Europeans, preachers and typically Haguean bluffers.

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5 maart 2005

Travels Around My Bookshelf 5

Jonathan Howells

naaktbiddenklein (26k image)

For some reason, otherwise perfectly sensible writers like John Irving don’t rate Wolfe. They’re wrong, and, given Irving’s poor form of late, would be best advised to keep their opinions to themselves.

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26 februari 2005

Travels Around My Bookshelf 4

Jonathan Howells

The news that Hunter S Thompson (Dr, if you like, though I never really saw the point of that store-bought title – it did him no favours) has killed himself arrived like a shock but has settled on me as being sadly inevitable. Thompson was a man with little patience for any sort of weakness, and watching his body corrode beneath his eyes (if they held out long enough to see) can’t have been an attractive proposition.

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18 februari 2005

Pride and prejudice in the Netherlands Indies

Peter Breedveld

Dongen (20k image)

Six years ago Rampokan: Java was published, the first part of Peter van Dongen’s graphic novel set in the Netherlands Indies, now known as Indonesia. The story takes place at the eve of the so-called Police Actions (a euphemism for the full-blown colonial war between the Dutch and Indonesian nationalists that took place in 1947 and 1948) and with it Van Dongens solid reputation as a serious graphic novelist was established. Recently the second and last part at long last appeared: Rampokan: Celebes.

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12 februari 2005

You have to be careful

Peter Breedveld

sacco (14k image)

Joe Sacco is a journalist who writes his stories in the form of comic strips. He went to Palestine in the early nineties to report about the Gaza Strip, which resulted in the book Palestine. Later he went to Bosnia where he visited a Muslim enclave in Serbian territory, described in Safe Area Gorazde. Last summer The Fixer (translated in Dutch as De Fikser) appeared, about Sacco’s dealings with a shady Bosnian ex-soldier called Neven.

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11 februari 2005

Travels Around My Bookshelf 3

Jonathan Howells

NaaktBesjeuitsnede (54k image)

I don’t have time for science fiction anymore – it’s one of those things, like The Beano, chewy sweets and hating your parents, that one should put away once they’ve got past puberty. Reading some science fiction in one’s formative years isn’t a bad thing, but impressionable minds should find a balance between space operas and star battles and the more important areas of writing. Sadly this country is full of wasted youths who, having mastered the skill of reading, find themselves addicted to the modern equivalent of penny dreadfuls.

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4 februari 2005

Travels Around My Bookshelf 2

Jonathan Howells

naaktedans2-uitsnede (16k image)

One thing a book lover decides upon early on is whether they like hardbacks or paperbacks. For me, there’s no real choice here – it’s hardbacks all the way. I can’t imagine a reason why I’d buy a book in paperback in preference of a hardback. Paperbacks are ugly little items, the fag packets of publishing. No matter how handsome a volume is in its original hardback edition, once it gets shrunk down into paperback, it looks like trash.

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4 februari 2005

Mecca Cola

Richard Letterman

meccaad (13k image)

Being an international man of danger such as myself doesn’t necessarily mean cobra venom and monkey eyes at every meal. No, occasionally I get those rare forbidden fruits straight out of Arabian Nights that no average white man gets to experience, such as “prunes” and “yogurt”. Don’t be embarrassed if you find yourself baffled or unable to pronounce these delicacies, it’s not your fault you’re just an ignorant rube. Recently, while shopping for prunes and yogurt at the local Turkish market, I came across the infamous and mysterious Mecca Cola.

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4 februari 2005

Witness to the Devil

Peter Breedveld

blanketscover (64k image)

Craig Thompson (1975, US) is the author of the most raved about graphic novel of the past two years, Blankets, translated in Dutch as Een Deken van Sneeuw. Six hundred pages long, Blankets is touching, funny, exciting, melancholic, smart, slapsticky, shamelessly sentimentalistic at times and really, really beautifully drawn. Last summer I spoke to Thompson, who was touring Europe and had just returned from a trip to Morocco.

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