in the new anti-kraak universe you play squatter upside-down in your brain at parties you proffer slim handshakes, some modest attempts at dutch & a determination to stand there all day like a boer in a landscape where he is indigenous - the white light shining from his invisibly big head; yet you fall under the dim star of sleep (where eerie canals watch you breathe & you stagger from one station to another - drugged by sundown, watching the big orange heat ball swinging royally low over the meer a cardboard world where settlers merrily invade each other after dinner ... you lose a continent over coffee or else blood-red wijn, a casualty of summer time where the day & the air & the land are belong to us
Tag: Daveylands (page 3 of 3)
It would be nice to think that the English and Dutch languages are similar.
In many instances – individual words, phrases, roots – they are indeed related; however it is precisely their differences that make true understanding possible.
This is immediately apparent when any native English speaker confronts the strange and rigid (and seemingly atonal) Dutch alphabet. While some letters sound the same as their English counterparts, others sound like other English letters.
Further, this can lead to confusion when English speakers spell words or names aloud, as I discovered when I had to spell my name out to a Dutch teleworker recently.
Listen to this audio clip of the Dutch ‘alfabet’ being read aloud.
You’ll notice immediately that key vowels are different: “A” is like the English “R”; “E” sounds like the English “A”; and “I” sounds like the English “E”. Thankfully “O” and “U” are reasonably consistent.
Let’s not even get started on the consonants just yet. When the teleworker read my name back to me, it had been garbled. I had become Devid Paetia.
Paging Mr Paetia, Mr D. Paetia …
in the heart of your mouth there's a tongue there's a beat there's a heart shaped like stars & that's where you are (& valentine's day lasts for ten more hours when you're on the line you're mine i'm whining about how time will neither speed up nor slow down & here we are in a zone that's out of time & out of tune with here & there i stumble on & stare out the windows of trains & trams thinking of a powerkus & of tongzoenen it's not a zone it is a kus & it is not like cous cous but a kus a bus full of kussen & there's a hole in the clock & it's stopped the video froze right at the part where we embraced the zero dial a figure-eight face "cut!" yells the director & we just stare (go back to the script & learn your parts i read the in-flight magazines of airlines i have never flown on inspect their routes the clusters of curving red lines meeting in strange locations like maui & nairobi (i exists on some plane level with cloud seen from an airbus like an airkus my tongue is circling inside my mouth & like a shark we never stop moving even in our sleep & gills well what are they for? (learn your lines! this day it is in transit it's a passenger without luggage strolling past a carousel ha ha it says i have no need to wait today is my name & you are here cross-fade these heartbeats dj spin your wheels! love songs are so yesterday (when we have tongzoenen on the tip of your tongue is the destination i will be there in three weeks okay? okay.