Welcome to my Blog!
I hope to share here my irrepressible thoughts on news, music, books, arts, history, cultural events and such like.
In general these will be items, events and issues which I feel have no place on my website (which focusses on aviation history and my travel photography).

The item immediately below this would be the latest posting.

"Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself. - Charles Baudelaire
Esse est percipi (To be is to be perceived)" ¬Bishop George Berkeley

"Not even I understand everything I am" ¬Aurelius Augustinus of Hippo

"I'm only myself in front of my typewriter" ¬Joan Didion (I'd replace 'typewriter' by 'desktop PC'..)

In 2013 I started a series of photo albums on Blurb.com, named '36Exp' (a subject adressed in 36 exposures, a reference to the exposures on most common rolls of 35 mm film: 12, 24 & 36 exp.) back in the day.
The books can be ordered directly from the Blurb.com or Amazon.
www.blurb.com/user/ruudleeuw

CURRENT BLOG

Donna Leon does what Georges Simenon can no longer do: her commissioner is not called Maigret but Brunetti, and the setting is not Paris but Venice.

Marrative: On an early spring morning, a violent confrontation takes place on a square in Venice between two teenage gangs. One of the boys who is arrested is the son of Dario Monforte, whom Guido Brunetti is 'interested' in at the time.
Brunetti discovers that Monforte was publicly celebrated 20 years earlier for his heroic actions at an Italian military facility in Iraq. Yet Monforte never received a medal, neither from the carabinieri nor from the Italian government. This apparent contradiction and the brutal attack on one of Brunetti’s colleagues by a possible gang member raise questions.
It gradually becomes clear that Monforte is trying everything to divert the police’s attention from his son, and indirectly from himself.

Donna Leon seems to move even slower in this novel; it starts with youth gangs going at each other in Venice. Commissario Griffoni escorts a youth home who isn't claimed by his parent(s) during the night.

On Wikipedia I found no Italian involvement of Nasiriyah (also spelled Nassiriya or Nasiriya), is a city in Iraq, the capital of the Dhi Qar Governorate. It lies on the lower Euphrates, about 360 km (225 miles) south-southeast of Baghdad, near the ruins of the ancient city of Ur.
It is where Dario Monforte received his injuries during a terrorist attack.

The narrative has a focus on youth culture, their communication, their own 'language' and identity, their violence. Dottor Bocchese, of the forensic team, is a victim of such a crime. Their is a much lesser role voor Brunetti's family (for Paolo only what she serves him as food), Vianello is elsewhere. The main investigative team is Brunetti with Griffoni, and in a different role Bócchese, Elettra Zorzi (referred to as "signorina Elettra" as allways) in a lesser role.
It was fun to find mention of 'Caltanissetta', a city we briefly visited a few weeks ago, as a Maffia base..

en.wikipedia.org: Guido_Brunetti_novels
www.uitgeverijcargo.nl/boek/de-vuurproef/ (NL)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasiriyah

Love New York? Of course you do. Now, celebrate all of the city’s charisma, glamour, and grit in our blockbuster collection of New York photography, charting the history and many wonders of the Greatest City in the World.
The Big Apple is featured by the works of photographers of Margaret Bourke-White, Berenice Abbott, Ruth Orkin, and many, many more.

The city’s fluctuating fortunes are all represented, from the wild nights of the Jazz Age to the hedonistic disco era, from to the grim days of the Depression to the devastation of 9/11 and its aftermath, as its brokenhearted but unbowed citizens picked up the pieces.

New York’s remarkable rise, reinvention, and growth are not just the tale of a city, but the story of a nation, From the building of the Brooklyn Bridge to the immigrants arriving at Ellis Island; from the slums of the Lower East Side to the magnificent art deco skyscrapers. The urban beach of Coney Island and the sleaze of Times Square; the vistas of Central Park and the crowds on Fifth Avenue. The streets, the sidewalks, the chaos, the energy, the ethnic diversity, the culture, the fashion, the architecture, the anger, and the complexity of the city are all laid out in this kaleidoscopic book.

While I bought this book for the photos, I very much appreciated the text about this fascinating city!

www.taschen.com/en

Mattie Boom, curator of photography at the Rijksdienst Beeldende Kunst (RBK), describes here the development of techniques and visual forms, using 134 examples from the Rijksdienst collection, which largely consists of the Hartkamp collection, one of the largest privately assembled photograph collections in the world.
This collection was acquired by the State in 1984 and included more than 60.000 photographs and 6.000 books and magazines.
The RBK manages this collection together with other already acquired photo collections.
Photography, it is evident, is a medium with unlimited visual potential.

Letizia Battaglia (b.05Mar1935 – d.13Apr2022) was an Italian photographer and photojournalist.
Although her photos document a wide spectrum of Sicilian life, she is best known for her work on the Mafia.
A documentary film based on her life, Shooting the Mafia, was released in 2019.

Battaglia was born in Palermo, Sicily.
At the age of 14, her father became irate when she took interest in a boy, and sent her away to boarding school. Letizia wanted to escape and had ambitions to write. So at 16, she married Franco Stagnitta, who owned his own coffee business and came from a good family.
She believed he would allow her to continue her studies, but he wanted her to be a conventional stay-at-home wife, so her writing ambition was somewhat thwarted.
Unhappy in her marriage, she eventually took another lover, though her husband shot at her when he found out. She took their daughters and moved to Milan.

Battaglia took up photojournalism after her divorce in 1971, while raising three daughters.
She picked up a camera when she found that she could better sell her articles if they were accompanied by photographs and slowly discovered a passion for photography.
In 1974, after a period in Milan during which she met her long-time partner Franco Zecchin, she returned to Sicily to work for the left-wing L'Ora newspaper in Palermo until it was forced to close in 1992.

She took some 600.000 images as she covered the territory for the paper.
She documented the ferocious internal war of the Mafia and its assault on civil society. She sometimes found herself at the scene of four or five different murders in a single day...
Battaglia and Zecchin produced many of the iconic images that have come to represent Sicily and the Mafia beyond Italy.

en.wikipedia.org:_Letizia_Battaglia

Franco Zecchin (b. Milan, 1953 - ) moved to Palermo in 1975 and began his career as a photojournalist at the daily newspaper L’Ora, with special attention to the influential mafia organization Cosa Nostra.

The committed photographer focused his lens on attacks, funerals, protests, and the everyday reality of people trying to live in the shadow of this threat.
Zecchin's photos reflect an island in crisis and the resilience of its inhabitants.
The photographer is regarded as one of the most important visual chroniclers of the bloody mafia era in Sicily.

https://francozecchin.com/

'I have read quite a lot. That's nothing to boast about, because I only read for my own pleasure. You should try that too. Here's how it goes: you open a book, read a few pages, and if you don't like it, you close the book again.'

For ten years, Sylvia Witteman wrote about books in the Dutch daily newspaper De Volkskrant. Childhood nostalgia (Save Yourself. A handbook for those who are young and want to stay so), curiosities (USSR. 100 questions and answers from 1983), old gold like Emants and Couperus, the evergreens like Reve and – always – Carmiggelt, 'because I am intertwined with that man like ivy with an oak.'

Due to her omnivorous appetite for reading and steady browsing in bookstores, online, and in street libraries, over the years she subjected an improbably wide range of old loves, discoveries, and chance finds to her candid judgment. Make use of it!
I always enjoy her wit in writing, and so was this book again a great joy for me to read.

NL.wikipedia.org::Sylvia_Witteman

Sicilian thriller, by Cristina Cassar Scalia

After the thrilling 'Zwart Zand' (EN:Black Sand), Cristina Cassar Scalia takes the reader back to the island of Sicily in 'De Nachtvissers' (EN:The Night Fishermen), for a second thriller featuring Commissioner Vanina Guarrasi as the protagonist.

It is half past three in the night. Pediatrician Manfredi Monterreale and journalist Sante Tammaro see from their fishing boat, high above the rocks, the vague outline of a man. He drags a heavy suitcase behind him and throws it among the rocks into the sea.
A few hours later, Commissioner Vanina Guarrasi receives an anonymous phone call: a woman's voice confesses to being involved in the murder of a young girl in a villa by the sea.
Both events turn out to be connected, and Vanina uncovers a treacherous plot that surpasses her worst imagination.

Cristina Cassar Scalia graduated in Medicine and Surgery at the University of Catania; she lives in Aci Castello where she practices as an ophthalmologist.
She made her debut in 2014 with the novel La seconda estate (translated in France and awarded the Capalbio Opera Prima Prize, which was followed the following year by Le stanze dello scirocco, set in Sicily.
In her novels (De Nachtvissers is the 2nd novel by her recently -2025- translated into Dutch), especially in those with Vanina Guarrasi as the protagonist, Sicily is central, even if described in a neutral way, so much so that it becomes not a simple background of the events, but a real character, capable of exerting an attractive force towards readers.
I like it too that a list of the main characters is published in front; I read this book while travelling through Sciliy which added a nice touch.
Translated into Dutch by Rianne Aarts & Annemart Pilon.

Wikipedia.org:_Cristina_Cassar_Scalia (EN)

With love from the Morisaki Bookshop / Satoshi Yagisawa - translated by Eric Ozawa
Manilla Press, 2024 (336 pages)

This beautiful, collectable hardback immediately caught my attention in the bookshop I visit regularly. The Japanese frame of mind was immediately recognizable.

A young woman, Takako, lost and heartbroken. Her eccentric, optimist uncle Saturu,His wife Momoko, with a mysterious secret.
Here, in this ramshackle bookshop in the Jimbocho area of Tokyo, these three people will heal their hearts, find connection and overcome loneliness.
Hidden away, the Morisaki Bookshop is a booklover's paradise. On a quiet corner in an old wooden building, the shop is filled with hundreds of second-hand books.
Here is where Takako comes to nurse a broken heart, finding within its crowded shelves books to soothe and uplift her flagging spirits.

Over the course of two novels, 'Days at the Morisaki Bookshop' and 'More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop', Takako and her uncle Satoru discover their similarities and differences, and learn all about life, love and the healing power of books.

Satoshi Yagisawa was born in Chiba, Japan, in 1977. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, his debut novel, was originally published in 2009 and won the Chiyoda Literature Prize.

en.wikipedia.org:_Days_at_the_Morisaki_Bookshop

Here are a few photos of mine (2018) taken in this book district of Tokyo where it takes place:

The center of Jinbōchō is at the crossing of Yasukuni-dōri and Hakusan-dōri, above Jimbōchō Station
on the Tokyo Metro Hanzōmon Line, Toei Mita Line and Toei Shinjuku Line.

Jinbōchō is officially known (in addresses, etc.) as Kanda-Jinbōchō (神田神保町), and is part of the
former ward of Kanda. In 2025 Time Out named it the coolest neighborhood in the world!

Jimbōchō Book Town is known as Tokyo's center of used-book stores and publishing houses, and
as a popular antique and curio shopping area.

See my JAPAN 2018 REPORTS
en.wikipedia.org:_Kanda-Jinbōchō