Rode the Canal Bus around, a peaceful interlude between getting wretched directions from Dutch nincompoops. Went to the Anne Frank Huis, which was surprisingly moving. I had this thought:
The Germans did not kill off the Jews in the Holocaust. The Jews, as a whole, survived. The Germans killed Europe. Europe the idea, the ideal, of which America was merely an eccentric expression, died with the first Jew. And the new “Jews of Europe” that Europeans and the European press talk about? Do they mean European Gentile fetishizing of the non-religious, cultural castaways from the former Soviet Union? The return of these people to claim their religious and cultural patrimony may enrich them, and it may allow Germans, and citizens of the collaborationist countries, to feel as though history itself was not murdered, as they feared. But it was. Europe is no longer an idea. It is a memory.
***
The canals are nothing but a 100-kilometer-long trailer park.
This city is positively buttered in shit, iced like a sheet-cake with dog shit, bird shit, human shit.
S. said: cities are either dog cities or cat cities. I would add, they are either straight cities or lesbian cities. Riga is a straight cat city. Amsterdam is a lesbian dog city. San Francisco is a deranged gerbil in an underwear drawer.
