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the Netherlands

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2020 Edition

                           World Literature: the Netherlands

                           History

     The Dutch Golden Age: gateway to our modern world, Hans Goedkoop

     An Embarrassment of Riches, Rembrant’s Eyes, Simon Schama

     Amsterdam, Russell Shorto

     The Autumn of the Middle ages, Erasmus and the age of Reformation, John Huizinga

     Van Gogh, Steven Naifeh & Gregory White-Smith

                           Literature

     The Erasmus Reader

     The Assault, Harry Mulisch

     Rituals, In the Dutch Mountains, The Following Story, All Souls Day, Lost Paradise, Cees Nootebaum

     Turkish Delight, Jan Wolkers

     The Angel Maker, Stefan Brijs

     The Vanishing, The Cabe, Tim Krabbe

     Threshold of Fire, In the Dark Wood Wandering, The Scarlet City, The Tea Lords, Hella S. Haase

     In Lucia’s Eyes, Arthur Japin

     Beyond Sleep, William Frederick Hemans

     The Ten Thousand Things, Maria Dermot

     The Book of Everything, Guus Kuiger

     Eline Verse: a novel of The Hague, Louis Couperous

     Public Secret, J. Bernlef

     No Sale, Patrick Conrad

     A Heart of Stone, Without Mercy, The Darkness that Divides Us, Renate Dorrestein

     The Storm, The Virtuoso, The Kreutzer Sonata, Margriet de Moor

     When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut 

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jayofdollhousepark

I am a former counselor, teacher, and debate coach who loves to read and write, and a student of literature, psychology, history, philosophy, and languages who loves to travel. Help me celebrate the lives and works of our great authors as a common human heritage. I can also be reached at jayofdollhousepark@gmail.com. Regarding my literary criticism on Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium: My initial project was to celebrate the authors whose work I love on their birthdays, by reading something of theirs and writing an appreciation. I've now come full circle and completed the calendar year. These are the authors whose works have been my companions through life, and some new discoveries. Many of their books are ones I also taught in high school English classes; works thoroughly lived with. I also include reading lists by national literature, a Modern American Literature group of lists, and Best Books of the Year lists and reviews. There will occasionally be my own poetry as well; you are warned. I hope that you may also find books which will help you through life and bring depth and joy to your days. As to my aesthetics, I envision the mission of creating civilization as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot may serve as paragons of their sides of the board and reflect each other as partners in the great game of reimagining humankind, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year. Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our systemic form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential in dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values. We need both conserving and revolutionary forces to envision and enact a thing of beauty, be it a person, story, song, film, theory, or any creative artifact of authentic human imagination and experience. A beautiful political structure may be judged by the same criterion as a beautiful poem; so also with humans and the values their actions embody. Thank you so much for your company on this journey. Regarding my daily political journal on Torch of Freedom, a voice of progressive democracy and the antifascist Resistance: I stand for liberty, equality, truth, and justice; a free society of equals. My America is a torch of Liberty and a beacon of hope to the world. I stand for the absolute structural and systemic equality of all human beings, and for the Rights of Man everywhere on earth. I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses. Herein I write as an agent of Chaos and Transformation whose goal in life is to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world. For thirty-nine years now I have been engaged in antifascist action, democracy activism, and revolutionary struggle against tyranny and state terror for the liberation of humankind, wherever men hunger to be free. And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut 1982 by the great Jean Genet as he formulated it in Paris 1940, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” Resist and fear not, O my brothers and sisters, for in resistance we seize our freedom and become Unconquered.

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