Detritus of the Brain from Our Visit to Europe

1

The Smurfs! Oh my goodness, I forgot the Smurfs.

In the 1958 the Atomium was finished and opened in Brussels. But something else debted that year as well, and they were also a Belgian creation, "Der Shtrumpfs," which was later Anglicized as "The Smurfs."

I had no idea before going that the Smurfs were a Belgian thing, like mayo on fries, huge-dimpled waffles, and angry French/Dutch.

2

I meant to find and share the following slide. I took the picture with Corrie's phone and sent it to mine, lovingly referring to it as "Nerd stuff:"

It was from the conclusion of our Japanese speaker's talk, where he discussed how feldspar, a mineral that makes the occasional crystal, can split light beams and cause a doubling effect, which was a thematic element of Pynchon's Against the Day. In this diagram is the conclusion of his thesis, about how Pynchon arrived at the name of "Umeki Tsurigane" for a character in AtD, how it came from Madame Butterfly and the combo of the 1954 novel and subsequent 1957 film of Michener's Sayonara.

The whole thing captures well the depth of the Pynchon party every two years.

3

I knew I had this picture somewhere:

This is from Aachen, and is the collection of attached buildings that survived the allied bombing during WWII and originally date back to before 1000 CE.

Here a postwar pic:

4

I tried to take this crazy reflective picture off an orange glassed sculpture in Brussels. It didn't work out so well, but here we are:

I reserve the right to keep adding anecdotes, because I feel like I still had at least one more story left. I just can't remember.

Table of Contents for Germany and the Low Countries 2026

 International Pynchon Week 2026, Dortmund, Germany, baby!

1. Just got home
   
2. Introduction
3. Numbers Fun
   
4. Day Zero
   
5. Dortmund
   
6. International Pynchon Week 2026
   
7. Aachen
   
8. Brussels
   
9. WTF Watches
   
10. Antwerp
    
11. Amsterdam
    
12. Journey Home
    
13. Staying in Epic Places
    
14. Graphic Novels, and the Missed One
    
15. BEER!
    
16. Laundry
    
17. Field Trip to Coal Mine
    
18. Movies on a Plane
    
19. Conclusions
    
20. Detritus of the Brain
    

We made it! There and back!

(Updated)

All in All...

Holy hell, a fantastic trip!

Originally part of the plan was to visit Bruges and possibly Ghent, but as the heat dome settled down on us in Dortmund, we called an audible and decided to skip both. Too much time in a bus on multiple days.

The kids did well, but obviously not every second was sunshine and happy times. We rode bikes, we painetd pictures, we ate some exotic grub, and we sweated the sweat of weary Yanks. We watched soccer and some of the Dwayne Johnson Hercules movie.

Cass found numerous young ladies with which he could start conversations. Camille painted pictures and made jokes, and both kids kept up quite well with our shenanigans. They may have been complaining and bitchy for plenty of it, but they made it all the same, all seven to twelve miles of walking a day.

Hopefully the memories will be there for our youngest. I think they'll be foundational for Cass. Time will tell.

Good times, for us, for sure. We've been at it for a few years now, but...I guess this is what we do.

Movies on Planes

As I round out the collection of pieces from our European adventure, I thought I'd mention some movies that I saw on the airplanes. 

Back in 2019, I saw Dog Day Afternoon for the first time on the airplane to Rome (and watched it on the way back, too).

The big movie for me this time was this year's Oscar nominee "The Secret Agent:"

I watched the first forty minutes without sound, for lack of headphones, but since it's subtitled, it didn't really matter.

Have you seen it? It't hard to describe. It sticks with you, which is something. The opening scene has our star, Oscar nominated Wagner Moura, driving a VW Beetle into a gas station outside of Recife, in northern Brazil, during Carnival in 1977. The corpulent worker wearing a shortsleeved button-up shit with no buttons buttoned, fills his tank and explains why there's a corpse in the parking lot covered with a sheet of cardboard. Cops do show up, but not for the corpse ("They'll be here soon for him," they say), but really just to extort Wagner Moura's character. He gives them his remaining cigarettes. 

It's engaging, but hard to explain why, and the whole thing is like that.

I also watched, fully silently, a little Quebecois movie with the translated name "Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person:"

It was fun and silly.

Lastly, after I did get some earphones, and after I finished The Secret Agent, I watched one of the Kenneth Branagh's Poirot movies, "A Haunting in Venice:"

When I saw it had both Tina Fey and Michelle Yeoh in it, I thought, hell yes. It's both a haunted house story and a murder mystery, and it's filmed sumptuously in Venice. 

I've tried to find all three since we've been back. Tough crowd right now, anyway.

Forgot one!

I thought we had another graphic novel purchased on this trip:

We purchased this at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. It's done in a comic style very reminiscent of Herge's Tin-Tin.

I haven't finished this yet, but it has a young man looking around his grandmother's attic for items that he could use to celebrate her on Queen's Day (a Dutch celebratory holiday, on the sovereign's birthday). While looking around he finds some pictures and some evidence that, eh, there are some secrets in the pasts of his ancestors. Like trying to keep a small family of Jews hidden from the occupying Nazis.

It's harrowing and sobering at the same time, like much of the Dutch approach to their checkered past in the tropics.

This was in a bag that wasn't looked through until today. Whoopsie!

Field Trip to Zeche Zollern

This was the field trip to the coal mine in Dortmund. The Zeche Zollern coal plant was the first that ended up powered by electricity. The weather was beginning to warm up, and the tour guide spoke only German (our original English-language tour guide fell ill), but it was a fun time.

We rode the bus through Dortmund for an hour, which helped inform my view of regular life in that western German city.

"Zeche" is a German term that means 'colliery' or 'mine,' and "Zollern" refers to a German royal family, a noble family, the Hohenzellern, that dates back to the 1200s-ish.

Anyway, the whole area was modeled after a noble courtyard:

But, of course, the central building housed the mine officer's offices, which had a panopticon effect.

Inside some of the buildings, which were modeled after cathedrals, the stained glass windows were adorned with images of labor:

The workers were all assigned a chain basket within which they would store their clothes for the day. They would, using the chain, pull down their basket, change clothes, and pull it back up to the rafters:

This is one of the main coal working centers. The diagonal lines were for pulling elevator chords, elevators for both people and for coal. 

It was said that if you were not at roll call in the mine at 6 am, you wouldn't get paid for the day. The best way to make sure you were at roll call, was to take the Men's Elevator. If you slept in, or otherwise missed the Men's Elevator, you'd have to take the last coal elevator before roll call. The Men's Elevator went at a respectable 40 kph (about 11 mph), but the coal elevator rocketed down at 70 kph (nearly 20 mph).

There was a large transformer room, with cool gears and capacitors and all kinds of cool electro-mechanical stuff.

I tried imagining the sound and the action of the place in full working order. 

But then it's hard to ignore the Allied-forces pummeling Dortmund took as a center for coal industry and munition factories. It's almost surprising any of the old infrastructure still exists.

Dortmund was picked as the location for the IPW in parts because of a quote from Gravity's Rainbow: "Consider coal and steel. There is a place where they meet," that, and a university's faculty that loves and teaches multiple classes in Pynchon's works.

Besides a snafu on the way home, this was a great little trip, and to see the inner workings of an energy industry that's now a museum. It was said that it had to lay dormant from the postwar period until the 1990s before they figured they could turn it into a place for learning, or before they learned how to do that, and once the realized that people would come to learn.

On the day of this field trip I had Corrie's phone. She had mine to take back to the SIM card people to make it sure it would work. Hers worked, and for that day we switched. She got mine working, and we switched back, but not before I took a handful of pictures that took a while to get access to. 

Germany! Trying to come to terms with their own monstrous shadow in real time.

Laundry, In Three Parts

 The First

Friday. It was hot. Super hot. Sweaty. The last things for the IPW were done early, and later we were going to go to Domicil and see a violin show. I walked down to the laundromat and tried to figure the system out. You had to choose the machine on a screen. Then pay on the screen, then walk over to the machine and press start. It was 9€ per wash (yikes!), but he dryers were only, like, one euro for 12 minutes, but one dryer didn't get hot at all.

Ahh, domestic duties.

The Second

We were leaving the next day from Brussels, and the need was there again to get the piles of sweaty clothes through the washer. I put eyes on while we were walking around town the day before, or earlier in the day, and it was similar to Dortmund in that it was on a screen where you have to choose, and pay, and get change. I took the kids with me, but then Corrie finished up her museum visit and came and got them, as I sat, sweaty, wearing my swim trunks, their mesh undergarment making the time unpleasant.

The Third

We were heading home a few days later, but the kids weren't going to make it with their underwear, and so I headed out again one bright evening in Amsterdam, with the heatwave having mostly broken. This was the closest spot, and there were very few washers or dryers, and I'm not sure if anyone using it while I was there lived in the neighborhood. Again, it was expensive, and again it didn't work very well, but...that's the job.

No place took cards---all were cash only. That could be challenging, but we made it work.

Nothing like laundry while abroad, baby!