The Westerkerk's bell is ominous. . .

I haven't been blogging because this trip to be honest, I haven't been doing much of anything except staring at a Word document and wishing words of brilliance would just magically appear (they don't). Sitting in a bamboo chair with a bright purple cushion, staring out at the balcony full of plants (including a naughty plant), and the words aren't coming.

The backs of the houses I can see surround a private garden shared by those who have property on the street level called a hofje in Dutch that is sort of like a courtyard. In Amsterdam the most famous hofje is located on the Spui, called the Begijnhof. There will be, next to the Esprit Cafe a beautiful wooden door and a miniscule little sign. You might see people coming in and out of it. Go inside and take a look.

But for me this view is a bit like Hitchcock's Rear Window, except of course I hope I don't witness a murder. I can see so much of what is going on inside that it's too tempting to not look from time to time (and to be fair I leave the curtains open in case anyone wants to have a look at me). It does inspire me a bit since back at home the view I get when I look at the window is mostly windowless building walls.

So yesterday I got it in my head that I wanted to go scour the Waterlooplein market for vintage clothes. If you love vintage clothes, Amsterdam is a good city for it. Amongst the 9 Straatjes, the Nine Streets (in the Jordaan area) you have lots of shops, but also along the route to Waterlooplein on Nieuwe Hoogstraat there are plenty more including another location for Zipper, which does great mens vintage. On the Waterlooplein you can also find another Episode vintage store, but I think the one on Berenstraat is much better.

I start wandering toward the Waterlooplein, but first I need to withdraw cash. One thing that drives me a bit batty about Holland is that my French bank card isn't accepted at the Albert Hein grocery store or pretty much anywhere else and some of my other complaints are that finding a cash machine, post office, or tobacco shop are pretty tough to do without memorising what is where and how far from this or that.

For example I stay in the Jordan area near Elandsgracht. There are two cash machines on Elandsgracht. One inside the Albert Hein and one outside. There is a tobacco shop on the Elandsgracht, but it's for some reason usually closed which means I either have to go up to the Rozengracht (at Westerkerk) because there's a post office drop off box along the Prisengracht and a tobacconist on the Rozengracht near the other Albert Hein, which doesn't have a cash machine.

And that's just when I'm located at the flat. When I'm out and about, all the other locations come into play. I'm pretty sure how the Dutch handle it is they do everything in their neighbourhood before they go anywhere else. I've been trying to watch the ebb and flow of the locals in my neighbourhood a little bit, and I'm starting to get the sense that why the Amsterdam morning starts later than in Paris is partly for this reason. People are waiting for the tobacconist, post office, and banks to open up at 10 and 11 and since the cafes open at around 8 or 9 (compared to 5 or 6 in Paris), they have coffees and read newspapers while they wait?

These are just some of my observations and they certainly don't apply to all the Amsterdammers. I've seen men hauling garbage and cleaning sidewalks along Warmoerstraat as early as 6 am and there is one place that opens early to accomodate people who work earlier than people living in the posh Jordaan area called Renee's Croissants (it opens at 6h30).

I withdraw cash at Dam Square and continue eastwards. After hitting the shops at Nieuwe Hoogstraat, I continue on to Waterlooplein, but the first thing I pick up in one of the piles on the ground (which can sometimes be as cheap as 1,00 euro a stuk,  piece) that smells like . . . there is no other word for it than butt. It smelled like a dirty butt.

The smell turned me off of looking at clothes (must remember this for the future as was so turned off I could barely even look at my own clothes to put on pj's last night) and thus I turned to books. I turned to books big time.

By the time I arrived home (after a quick stop at the Albert Hein to buy things to cook for dinner) I bought:

The Finnegans Wake Experience, Roland McHugh, Irish Academic Press, 1 euro (Waterlooplein)

A Dictionary of Historical Slang, Eric Partridge, Penguin Reference Books, 5 euros (Book passage*)

Flash and Filligree & The Magic Christian, Terry Southern, 1 euro (Waterlooplein)

White Fang, Jack London, Nelson's Library edition, 4 euros (Book passage*)

Happy Days, Samuel Beckett, Evergreen/Grove, 4,50 euros (Book Exchange)

The Dream Life of Balso Snell &

A Cool Million, Nathaniel West, New Directions, 4 euros (Book passage*)

There's No Business, Charles Bukowski illustrated by R.Crumb, Ecco edition, 6 euros (Book passage*)

* Now let me tell you where this book passage is because it's not far from Waterlooplein and just south on the same canal as Book Exchange on Kloveniersburgwal.

The same booksellers that sell in the "book passage" seem to also make an appearance at the Friday booksale on the Spui. I went of course on Friday and bought three books.

A Good Man is Hard to Find & Other Stories, Flannery O'Connor, 4 euros

Enduring Love, Ian McEwan, 6 euros

The Best of Roald Dahl, hardcover, 5 euros

My favourites out of my two days worth of purchases so far are the Flannery O'Connor stories and the opening to Nathaniel West's The Dream Life of Balso Snell. They're both writers of the grotesques so that might be what appeals to me at this moment. I'm also still enjoying my flirtation with the Beats Burroughs and Kerouac. I'm also remembering why Roald Dahl is such an inspiration to me, hoping to find Anton Corjbin's art book Control in a used bookshop, and planning to write like mad today.

Or at least read.

The cat eats the naughty plant, and apparently that's okay for the kitty. Since I'm housesitting I'm also tending to the naughty plant and you have to break off any of the yellowing leaves, so I couldn't resist setting up this photo (and pressing one of the leaves into my notebook).

Speaking of which, I'll be blogging about my new notebook purchase next!

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Garden Shed Writers (which will soon include me)

When I first saw the Maisonette on Craigslist the pictures made it look small and more like a garden shed than a possible home, but me being the kooky lady I am this appealed to me. Roald Dahl wrote in a shed and is my favorite of all children's writers, but he was not alone. Virginia Wolf, Dylan Thomas, George Bernard Shaw, and Philip Pullman wrote in garden sheds. Though no one comes close to having as many sheds for creative purposes as director Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick left behind thousands of boxes in numerous garden sheds built all over his estate.

Now technically the Maisonette is a shed. It's not the bare bones, one room variety but it is still a shed. It is nestled at the entrance of a larger property (and there is another shed on the property where someone else will be living besides the family we'll be renting from) with a beautiful garden and I truly mean beautiful. The  family we'll be renting from own a florist shop and their home garden is beautifully planted and organised.

When we visited the garden was full of flowers in every color of the rainbow, trees, and emerald green grass. Inside their house is a makeshift hospital for plants to reflower and regain their strength and beauty. At the time we visited there were three or four phalaenopsis orchids in the recovery ward. It was our new landlord who called his home a hospital, but as he spoke I realised it was actually a refuge. Few people can see the beauty of a plant when the flowers have faded and fewer people have the patience to wait for beauty to be reborn. I myself didn't see it until that moment.

And the little house will be a refuge for writers. A place to work when we want to escape the hectic life of Paris.

I've come to the conclusion that the only way to write with success is to treat it like a job, at least for me. Whether this means sitting in front of the computer or the typewriter (we have two, one with an English keyboard and one with a French keyboard that both work perfectly) or going out into the world for inspiration it will be work. I've read quotes from interviews of famous writers (and my pseudo-sibling Donald agrees) that writers are always writing even if it doesn't translate to accumulated pages of genius. Every experience adds to my writing, every observation, and every person I speak with (or don't) is writing in my head until I find a place for those things in a story.

Yesterday we had a torrential downpour and then in the afternoon a much needed break. I went out to my terrace to see what had become of my plants. All were water logged and needed a little attention. On a balcony across the street were three little children, who always wave to me and blow me kisses. On a whim I took a plastic jar of soap bubbles and began to blow a steady stream of bubbles hoping the wind would carry them over to the children.

I filled the entire street below us with bubbles and people raised their heads wondering where these little balls of magic where coming from. For a moment the children disappeared into their house and I saw when they returned that each of the children had their own little plastic jar of bubbles in their hands. They quickly learned that blowing soap bubbles can be a tricky task, but I encouraged them and applauded them as they succeeded and watched how closely they watched what I was doing in the hopes of achieving the same results. I observed their smiles, their joy, their frustration, how their family encouraged them. When I decided to leave them to continue on their own that for them some of the fun was lost and so the bubble-making stopped altogether.

Roald Dahl went to his shed every morning bringing with him the stories he'd made up to entertain his children the night before. I will go to the forest and my little house with all the stories I've ever made up, all the things I've seen and done, and all the hopes and dreams I have for my life.

Writing is the dream I have for my life. I am happy to know I'll be following a grand artistic tradition, but since the garden shed is pretty far away, it might take some fine tuning to make it so we have time to go out there, but we did sort of take the place on the premise we'd force ourselves.  Thankfully the whole little house is cheaper than a Paris studio apartment!

Here are a few pictures from Roald Dahl's shed courtesy of Roald Dahl's website.

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Taking a few pages from Henry Miller

I recently got my mitts on a book by Henry Miller with an appendix that originally appeared in an article entitled "Pour Une Bibliothèque Idéale".

I decided to compile my own list, in no particular order.

The Books that Have Influenced Me the Most

1. Miguel Angel Asturias, Mulatta and the Fly
2. Jean de la Fontaine, Fables et Contes
3. Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
4. Edith Hamilton, Mythology
5. Jerzy Kosinski, Painted Bird
6. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude
7. Yusunari Kawabata, A Thousand Cranes
8. Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
9. Miguel de Unamuno, Mist
10. Isabel Allende, House of Spirits
11. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
12. FUP, Jim Dodge
13. Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials Trilogy
14. JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit
15. C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia
16. Oscar Wilde, A Picture of Dorian Gray
17. Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
18. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
19. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
20. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
21. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
22. George Orwell, Animal Farm
23. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
24. W. Somerset Maugham, Collected Short Stories
25. W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
26. Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
27. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
28. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
29. Alexandre Dumas Pere, Le Comte de Monte Cristo
30. Alexandre Dumas Fils, La Dame aux Camelias
31. Aesop's Fables
32. Jose Saragamo, Blindness
33. Margueritte Duras, La Douleur
34. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
35. Cervantes, Don Quixote
36. Lady Murasaki, Tale of the Genji
37. Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme
38. Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum
39. George du Maurier, Trilby
40. Zola, La Ventre de Paris
41. Kate Chopin, The Awakening
42. Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
43. Anais Nin, Delta of Venus
44. Anais Nin, The Complete Diaries
45. Khaled Hosseni, The Kite Runner
46. Boccaccio, The Decameron
47. Homer, The Odessey
48. Plato, The Symposium
49. Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
50. The Perfumed Garden
51. Federico Garcia Llorca, Feder
52. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Voyage au bout de la nuit
53. Ovid, Metamorphoses
54. Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
55. Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking
56. Albert Camus, La Peste
57. A Thousand and One Nights
58. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
59. Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach
60. Michael Bond, Paddington Bear
61. E.B. White, Charlotte's Web
62. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu
63. Thomas Malory, La Mort d'Arthur

There are many more, but I guess I'll stop there for now...

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