TAKE ME TO THE RIVER

Big Mouth Billy Bass is a largemouth trout made of plastic attached to a board. When someone approaches - or presses a button - the fish erupts into a gritty rendition of a pre-programmed song, usually Al Green's 'Take me to the river'. At the chorus line, the head detaches from the board and the fish addresses the listener directly. There are YouTube videos of it. It couldn't be stupider. But popular the gadget is - Al Green seems to have been earning nice royalties for decades.

I recently came into possession of a second-hand lofi loop junky, an analogue effects pedal that can record and repeat 20 seconds of guitar or bass sound, only then the loop sounds, quite artistically, like it came out of a mouldy tape recorder. In case you are wondering what that has to do with a singing big mouth trumpet: that pedal seems to contain the same memory chip as Big Mouth Billy Bass. So I have the heart of a singing fish in my house, but in the form of a pedal. Apparently, I felt my life could use this creative boost. The heart's desires are strange.

Soon, Tjitske Jansen's fourth, long-awaited collection of poems will be published, titled Everybody has to be somewhere. Great title, I thought, but also: where do I know it from? After a while I remembered: it is the closing line of a poem of mine that has been hanging on the wall on the Leidseweg for about five years.

It seemed like pure coincidence to me, but I decided to ask Tjitske by e-mail if she knew that poem and maybe that's why she had come up with that title. Not that I would mind, rather complimentary. The truth was disconcerting: she didn't get that line from me, I got it from her. I wrote the poem it ended up in a few weeks after we had talked about it. I had only forgotten about it raptly. True, I can claim some insanity because my second daughter was only a few weeks old at the time, but still: that pedalboard parroting music, that mouldy tape recorder, the singing fish echoing 'Take me to the river' in a telephone voice - that's me.