part 3 :: long weekend in berlin :: do you read me?

i didn't have anything in particular that i wanted to do while we were in berlin, except for one thing - i hoped to find this bookstore again. it's really more of a magazine store and we visited it long ago when blog camp went to berlin. i didn't remember the name (despite how clever it is!), but i was so hoping it was still there. i didn't remember the name of it, but i knew it wasn't far from clärchens ballroom. i remembered correctly and it was indeed still there.

it doesn't have any normal magazines, just small, esoteric ones from independent presses. and it's so hard to pick just a few. i could have stayed much longer, but as it was, i did have a good browse. and i managed to pick just two to take home.

i'm working on a podcast about danish design right now and it seemed like so many of the magazines were about design. funny how that works when you're immersing yourself in a topic, it's suddenly everywhere.

do you read me - what a perfect name for a little independent bookstore. i'm so glad there are still such places in the world and that there were so many people visiting on a sunny saturday afternoon.

jordbo (earth dweller)

i decided recently that i need to get back to reading actual books. i listen to a lot of audio books, since i can do that in the car, or while mowing the lawn, cooking or puttering in the garden, but i need to hold a book in my hand and read again. no stupid homescapes on my phone or "just a few tiktoks" that turn into an hour. 

the author of this book was on our walk and wool tour the other day and read a lovely excerpt and seemed like such a lovely and thoughtful person, i knew i wanted to find the book. so when i passed by the bookstore in copenhagen where i knew it could be found, i went in to look for a copy.

the store is called brøg litteraturbar - it's a little indie bookstore and café and it looked like the kind of place i would feel very much at home. i could see why this book from a small, esoteric press would be available there. i looked around and found the book and browsed a little bit more. it's truly a lovely little store. 

the woman at the cash register was having a lively, warm conversation with the person ahead of me. but when i stepped to the cash register, her warmth vanished and she didn't say a single word to me. not even to tell me the amount. and she didn't ask if i wanted a bag for my book or anything. it was so strange. and very awkward.

i immediately felt flooded with a kind of shame. what had i done? i was in a good mood and she had been prior to waiting on me. was it just that i wasn't one of the regulars and she didn't know me? did she not like the book i was buying? did she hate my tattoos? was she resentful that i was carrying a small bag from sephora? she did look like the type who wouldn't approve of makeup. was that it? 

i approached the counter thinking that i would mention that i had met the author on a walk over the weekend and have a nice little chat, but she was completely closed to me and i didn't get the chance. she almost seemed angry at me. so puzzling. 

and while i've thought a lot about it since, in the moment, i managed to keep myself from letting it ruin my day. whatever it was, it was clearly her and not me. and while i do have the odd thought of writing it all as a google review, i think i would be a better person and a better earth dweller (that's what the name of the book means) if i don't.

daily delight - february 25

this has been a crazy week with a really big project at work. long days filled with teams meetings online and long evenings working. it's both exhilarating and exhausting and one last zoom at the end of the work day that stretched to almost two hours was a bit miserable (see previous post). more than a bit actually. and i cried real tears when it was over. at least that one wasn't work. the work stuff is good, even it is very intense right now. or maybe because it's very intense right now. but the book i ordered the other day - george saunders' a swim in a pond in the rain - arrived today and though the stupid post person left it out in the rain, leaned up against the door, it wasn't there long enough to get more than a bit damp. and though i have a lot of books piled on the shelf beside the bed, there's something delightful about a brand new book, freshly arrived. 

what happened to amazon?

i used to get mails from amazon that were filled with one thing after another that i couldn't resist - books, cameras, lenses. i couldn't click in and add them to my shopping cart fast enough. but the mails i get from them today are generic and lame, full of crappy stuff - tools, hip hop albums, non-apple electronics (gasp!) - that indicate that they no longer know me at all. even worse, today i got a mail from them that had no less than a dozen mega bloks halo sets. mega bloks for me? what? really? don't you know i'm a lego girl? amazon, are you trying to tell me you'd like to break up? or that we already broke up and i just didn't realize it?

i used to think amazon was as close as you could get to shopping in an actual shop in the virtual world. the suggestions below the items you're looking at are always related in a good way, but could easily lead you to other things, just like browsing in a bookstore. but it seems they've changed their algorithms and that's just not true anymore. i hate to sound like a crabby old woman who thinks everything was better in the old days, but really, amazon was better in the old days. luckily, i'm going to london next week and i can hang around in some real bookstores.

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i seriously need to visit chernobyl.

the arbness of book lists

book lists, i really don't get them. whether it's 32 books that will change your life or 50 incredibly difficult books for extreme readers or the guardian's top 100 books of all time or just the list that my goodreads literary adventures group wants to read in 2014, they're all so subjective. tho' the guardian isn't as far off as the others. i mean, that 50 difficult books list doesn't even include ulysses. not even i, who have had an entire semester-long course devoted only to ulysses and wrote a 25 page paper on it, have finished the damn thing. then there's my own list of the 88 books i read in 2013 (+ 7 harry potter, which aren't on the list). it's not so much subjective as eclectic. and i'm not recommending that anyone else follow it. i just like that goodreads helps me keep track of what i've read. i'd never have remembered reading all those books. hell, at my age, i hardly remember yesterday.

that said, i do love the book lists on brainpickings. they're often recommendations by theme, like this one of 9 books on reading and writing. especially because no. 9, mortimer j. adler's how to read a book, advocates writing in books as you read them (something which i love to do), saying that it's even essential to do so (with apologies to denmark's libraries). or this one, on the year's best books on writing and creativity. or the best children's, illustrated and picture books of 2013.  quality lists, thoughtfully composed, that i like.

my reading right now (and most of the time) is all over the place. i've spent far too long on this nick harkaway angelmaker book. it was recommended by the same bloggy friend who recommended edna farber's marvelous so big, so i had to read it, even if it wasn't the kind of book i'd normally read.  it is very imaginative and well-written, with lovely and unique turns of phrase, and even features some steampunk machinery, which i love, but for some reason, i'm reading it at a snail's pace. and it's not going to help that liz gilbert's signature of all things just arrived via amazon today, as i'm going to want to dive right into that. and i have to, because in ten days, i have a book club meeting where we're going to discuss it (plus it was my idea to read it for the book club, so i'd better have finished it).

how do you decide what to read? do you read more than one book at a time (that's part of my problem)? does the internet get in the way of your reading? or does knitting? i recently listened to an audio book of a danish thriller while knitting but i wonder if that counts as reading? when do you read? i tend to read before going to sleep, but if i'm enthralled by a book, i read whenever i can. i also often read while i'm eating lunch. i also like to read in front of the fire in the evening, that's probably my favorite reading time, but that can also be social, family time, so i don't always get to indulge in that.

what are you reading right now? and what will you read next? will you consult a list?

flea market finds

this year's flea market was a bit disappointing. there wasn't any good 70s pottery and when i first went, it was so crowded that it was actually downright unpleasant. but here and there, in between, i managed to find a few treasures. like this embroidered mormor (grandma) pillow with a fine rooster on it. 

i spotted these tiny houses in amongst a bunch of plates and cups that i wouldn't want. they were probably made by some child in school, but i love them.

the guy said i could give 5 kroner for both, but i felt badly about that, so i gave 5 kroner each (about $1). the money does, after all, go to the local scouts.

these will go nicely on my tiny houses board on pinterest (which is part of why i've posted so many photos of them here).

i do wish the child who made them had signed them. that would make them even nicer.

i also found this little teal blue typewriter for just 50 kroner. the blue is much better than it looks in this photos. i've not tried it yet, but i shall.

i had to have this sweet little red enamel bowl - it will be a perfect berry picking bowl. it says made in yugoslavia on the bottom, which makes it even more charming in my book.

tobias approves of the new chicken pillow. or maybe it's just that i put it in his favorite chair.

* * *

i love this little article about unusable words.

* * *

and how about an imaginary world encyclopedia that is unreadable?

* * *

and speaking of books, reading this article makes me long to have lived in another time.

bunnies and books

don't mess with the sugar nose

this bunny is from a litter of 6, he's the littlest one, but he looks tough anyway, doesn't he? maybe he has to be, being one of 6. i don't know why i'm calling him he, i have no idea whether he is a boy or girl. it's too hard to tell with baby bunnies what they are. often you first find it out when they have just made some more baby bunnies. do you suppose it will damage his self image if i keep calling him he and he's really a she? do bunnies care about stuff like that?

just a little of the light reading that's on my nightstand. the bottom one about technology and urban development and the environment was written by my father-in-law in 1974. you'd be amazed how well the ideas about what makes a city livable hold up. he was a brilliant man. according to goodreads, less than nothing is the most lucid zizek in years. i love the loops he takes my brain on. it's kind of like how i imagine cocaine would be, only without all of the expense and needing to have clear sinuses. it's kind of interesting to think that libraries dispense something with the capacity to make your brain high on thoughts.

lest you think i've gone completely mad, here's the lighter reading on my nightstand. i've never read raymond chandler, but murakami loves him, so how could i not give him a whirl? i'm going to try to read them in order, but i don't always have control of when the books i've ordered come in at the library, so i've ordered the first four to start with.

that celebrating the third place book is full of stories of amazing places - plant nurseries, bookshops, cafés - that people love and use. we're working on something along these lines, so i want to read all i can about great third spaces. i've ordered the book by ray oldenburg that started it all - the good great place - and am impatiently waiting for it to come so i can read the theory behind the concept. roughly, as i understand it, the first place is home, the second place is work and the third place is somewhere you want to be. it can be a café, a library, a bookshop, a bar - anywhere that people gather because they desire to be there. such places develop a life of their own and i want to find out how.

other than reading, the weekend holds a party over on the devil's island and, as it's yet another long weekend with a monday holiday, lots of time in the garden. we've got to get planting now that the night frosts seem to be gone.

what are you doing this weekend?

surrounded by books

i've invited a group of creative, fabulous women over on friday for an evening of drink & draw. i got the idea from kim (she of the fabulous lampwork beads and findings). i'll make a mess of appetizers that will serve as dinner and we will laugh and drink wine and get out our sketchpads and draw something together.

tho' the house isn't as we ultimately want it to be and in fact, in spots, it's downright embarrassing (did they really have to use seven different ceilings?), i decided i needed this too much to let that stand in my way. so i'm making the best of it - i've rearranged and moved shelves and unpacked a bunch of books that have been boxed for two years. it strikes me that books make things cozy and homey like nothing else and so if i fill the room with books, maybe they won't notice that the radiators don't match.

placing the books on shelves was like getting reacquainted with old friends. i am absolutely convinced that surrounding ourselves with beloved books is good for the soul. i paged through and smiled at titles and memories of classes where i read them or papers i wrote flooded back, until i felt the whole room was coated in a warm blanket of words and the memory of words and thoughts and ideas. and i knew then that it will be all right to have these women over - that i am comfortable being judged by my books, even if i am not my house (yet).

i don't think i'll ever go wholly electronic on the books front, real, actual physical books bring me far too much pleasure for that. i started to try to make a pile of ones i'd be willing to donate and found that i couldn't bring myself to put any of them in that pile. so when the house is renovated, there will just have to be a whole lot of shelves. a life without books is not worth living. and a life surrounded by them is that much better.

top books: how many have you read?

the guardian published a list of the top 100 works of fiction of all time. the list was voted upon by 100 top writers from 54 countries and originally released by the Norwegian Book Club. cervantes' don quixote was voted #1, but the others are just listed in alphabetical order.  i love lists like this, even if they are utterly subjective.

here's the guardian's list (i just lifted it from their website, hence the capital letters)...how many have you read?

Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, (b. 1930), Things Fall Apart
Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark, (1805-1875), Fairy Tales and Stories
Jane Austen, England, (1775-1817), Pride and Prejudice
Honore de Balzac, France, (1799-1850), Old Goriot
Samuel Beckett, Ireland, (1906-1989), Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy, (1313-1375), Decameron
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, (1899-1986), Collected Fictions
Emily Bronte, England, (1818-1848), Wuthering Heights
Albert Camus, France, (1913-1960), The Stranger
Paul Celan, Romania/France, (1920-1970), Poems.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France, (1894-1961), Journey to the End of the Night
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain, (1547-1616), Don Quixote
Geoffrey Chaucer, England, (1340-1400), Canterbury Tales
Anton P Chekhov, Russia, (1860-1904), Selected Stories
Joseph Conrad, England,(1857-1924), Nostromo
Dante Alighieri, Italy, (1265-1321), The Divine Comedy
Charles Dickens, England, (1812-1870), Great Expectations
Denis Diderot, France, (1713-1784), Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Alfred Doblin, Germany, (1878-1957), Berlin Alexanderplatz
Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881), Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov
George Eliot, England, (1819-1880), Middlemarch
Ralph Ellison, United States, (1914-1994), Invisible Man
Euripides, Greece, (c 480-406 BC), Medea
William Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962), Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury
Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880), Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education
Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain, (1898-1936), Gypsy Ballads
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Colombia, (b. 1928), One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
Gilgamesh, Mesopotamia (c 1800 BC).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany, (1749-1832), Faust
Nikolai Gogol, Russia, (1809-1852), Dead Souls
Gunter Grass, Germany, (b.1927), The Tin Drum
Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil, (1880-1967), The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Knut Hamsun, Norway, (1859-1952), Hunger.
Ernest Hemingway, United States, (1899-1961), The Old Man and the Sea
Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC), The Iliad and The Odyssey
Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906), A Doll's House
The Book of Job, Israel. (600-400 BC).
James Joyce, Ireland, (1882-1941), Ulysses
Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924), The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle Bohemia
Kalidasa, India, (c. 400), The Recognition of Sakuntala
Yasunari Kawabata, Japan, (1899-1972), The Sound of the Mountain
Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece, (1883-1957), Zorba the Greek
DH Lawrence, England, (1885-1930), Sons and Lovers
Halldor K Laxness, Iceland, (1902-1998), Independent People
Giacomo Leopardi, Italy, (1798-1837), Complete Poems
Doris Lessing, England, (b.1919), The Golden Notebook
Astrid Lindgren, Sweden, (1907-2002), Pippi Longstocking
Lu Xun, China, (1881-1936), Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Mahabharata, India, (c 500 BC).
Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt, (b. 1911), Children of Gebelawi
Thomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955), Buddenbrook; The Magic Mountain
Herman Melville, United States, (1819-1891), Moby Dick
Michel de Montaigne, France, (1533-1592), Essays.
Elsa Morante, Italy, (1918-1985), History
Toni Morrison, United States, (b. 1931), Beloved
Shikibu Murasaki, Japan, (N/A), The Tale of Genji Genji
Robert Musil, Austria, (1880-1942), The Man Without Qualities
Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States, (1899-1977), Lolita
Njaals Saga, Iceland, (c 1300).
George Orwell, England, (1903-1950), 1984
Ovid, Italy, (c 43 BC), Metamorphoses
Fernando Pessoa, Portugal, (1888-1935), The Book of Disquiet
Edgar Allan Poe, United States, (1809-1849), The Complete Tales
Marcel Proust, France, (1871-1922), Remembrance of Things Past
Francois Rabelais, France, (1495-1553), Gargantua and Pantagruel
Juan Rulfo, Mexico, (1918-1986), Pedro Paramo
Jalal ad-din Rumi, Afghanistan, (1207-1273), Mathnawi
Salman Rushdie, India/Britain, (b. 1947), Midnight's Children
Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran, (c 1200-1292), The Orchard
Tayeb Salih, Sudan, (b. 1929), Season of Migration to the North
Jose Saramago, Portugal, (b. 1922), Blindness
William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616), Hamlet; King Lear; Othello
Sophocles, Greece, (496-406 BC), Oedipus the King
Stendhal, France, (1783-1842), The Red and the Black
Laurence Sterne, Ireland, (1713-1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Italo Svevo, Italy, (1861-1928), Confessions of Zeno
Jonathan Swift, Ireland, (1667-1745), Gulliver's Travels
Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910), War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Thousand and One Nights, India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt, (700-1500).
Mark Twain, United States, (1835-1910), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Valmiki, India, (c 300 BC), Ramayana
Virgil, Italy, (70-19 BC), The Aeneid
Walt Whitman, United States, (1819-1892), Leaves of Grass
Virginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941), Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse
Marguerite Yourcenar, France, (1903-1987), Memoirs of Hadrian

at 58, i've got a ways to go, tho' i can say that some of them (berlin, alexanderplatz?) probably aren't on my list. and i find murakami to be distinctly missing, but perhaps he was among those who voted. i'm pleased to see no less than 4 dostoevsky - go russians! but really, where is alice in wonderland, shouldn't that be there somewhere? and really, if celan's poems are there, where is pushkin? and bulgakov is clearly missing. and although i liked zorba the greek, does it really belong on this list? damn these lists, they have a way of making me want to make my own.

first things first

poring over decorating books is a nightly activity.

when you move into a new house, especially one where you know you're going to do a whole lot of work on it before you truly settle in, you are selective about what you unpack. you have to have enough things out for your everyday life, but you don't necessarily need that special checkerboard cake pan at the ready. i found that i immediately went to work unpacking the kitchen. because if the kitchen feels relatively normal, you feel like you can more or less function on an everyday basis. this kitchen, with its horrible pepto bismol pink cupboards (going to remedy that this weekend), has loads of cupboards, so i've managed to put things away and then forget which of the many cupboards i put them in...now where were those measuring cups again? but the teacups are in place, as are plates and pots and pans and a selection of the most essential cookbooks. oh, and the liquor cabinet - at least with the essentials (read: hendrick's gin stash) at hand. a girl does have her priorities.

the second most unpacked room is the bathroom, because that also needs to feel more or less normal for you to function on a daily basis. makeup, contact lenses, hairbrushes, flat iron, husband's razor and towels are all at the ready. as far as our bedroom, work clothes are hung in the closet, but there are still loads of boxes along the sides of the room. luckily, we have a whole large room just to stash boxes in, so we've done that. the only problem is that in frantic searches for various essential items, those boxes keep shifting around and it's becoming impossible to find anything. i'll have to try to get some order in that area this weekend.

for the child, the first priority was the satellite t.v. package we had promised her (a horse, a saddle, an iPhone, a season pass to Legoland, an iPad, satellite t.v. - the kid made out like a bandit on this move). her father dutifully went down and acquired the box for that on saturday and got it up and running. to her relief, she now once again has her fill of hannah montana on a daily basis.

for me, it was essential to get the iMac out and set up my desk area, tho' i'll admit that the computer feels rather useless without an internet connection (just got confirmation that it comes on tuesday - YAY!). but i have had time to process loads of pictures, so that's a good thing. i do, however, out of habit, find myself rather frequently hitting that little firefox icon down at the bottom and feeling a twinge of sadness when it tells me that i'm offline. oh well, it's probably good for me.

several boxes of "essential" books have been unpacked - the decorating books above are being used on a nightly basis as we readjust our thinking about what we're going to do with the house - e.g. tear down at least part of it. surprisingly, since deciding to do that we've felt much more free about the whole thing and less constricted. it really opens up the thinking and lets husband's inner architect run free.

it somehow felt important to cook in the house right away. i brought the first meal along from the old house--i had made extra veal parmesan so we had a pan of that to begin with the night we moved in. it seemed right to bring something from the old kitchen to the new one. the next day, i made our favorite focaccia. there were leftovers of it that got a bit dry, so i cubed the bread, tossed it with some spicy sausage and garlic in a pan and we gobbled that as an appetizer the next night. eating good food you make yourself in a new place sets the tone.

this weekend will bring lots more settling in, a bit of painting and definitely some riding. happy weekend one and all!

a moment of perfect clarity

sometimes, you find yourself in heaven a used bookstore and you find the most marvelous and unexpected thing. something you didn't even know existed, but when you saw it and paged through it, it made your molecules hum in perfect alignment and you knew that you had to have it. and you thanked your lucky stars that someone saw fit to sell off a woman named birgitta schøning's fabulous collection of embroidery and quilting books. and you wish, just for a moment, that you had had the chance to know her or at the very least to see what she made with the inspiration she found. and you wonder if the inspiration you'll find there will echo hers or continue hers or somehow carry along the line that extends clear into the book. and you sigh. and you are happy. and oddly you realize you have no problem reading swedish.

this is a precursor to elizabeth's marvelous soul food project
(don't worry, i've already scanned and sent it to her.)

close-ups of the above quilt

this is also loaded with embroidered words and clearly dense with meaning

i wondered aloud once whether memory can be preserved in cloth.

and now i believe it can.

more amazing embroidery

and the quilts in this book. so much inspiration. which i'll save for another day.

sometimes you find a treasure when you least expect it.

and when you most need it.

books bring comfort

as i write this, i feel a little like i'm coming down with a flu. there's something going around. and coupled with grey, rainy weather, it has me thinking about comforts. like curling up with a good book. bee wrote a couple of weeks ago about her comfort reads (and a lot of other favorite book categories) and so i've been thinking about this for awhile. when polly wrote about it too, that sealed it. i've got to make lists of favorite books--my categories are, for the most part, loosely adapted from bee's and polly's...

childhood favorites:

1. really rosie - maurice sendak (i had both book and record - we still play the music in the car when we travel as a family)
   
2. chronicles of narnia - c.s. lewis (i still reread these every once in awhile. and i truly didn't get the christian references as a kid. i just wanted to be lucy.)
3. little women - louisa may alcott (i read this dozens of times and fancied myself as jo)
4. little men - louisa may alcott (ditto this and i think i even liked it better--i wanted to live in that big old house with all those boys)
5. the little house books - laura ingalls wilder (i had dresses to dress up and played little house for hours on end. i even went to the LIW pageant in DeSmet, SD, tho' all i really remember were the mosquitos because it was outdoors.)
6. fox in socks - dr. seuss. (still love this one and read it with sabin regularly)

comfort reading (to which i return again and again)

1. no. 1 ladies detective series - alexander mccall smith (i love mma ramotswe. period.)
2. harry potter series - j.k. rowling (yup, i return to this one again and again - they're just such great characters and they do fit together wonderfully--she had to have really planned them out in advance)
3. master & margarita - mikael bulgakov (talking cats and people who materialize on street corners - ya gotta love it)
4. what i loved - siri hustvedt (although i siri-ed myself out last year, i'd be ready to go back to this one again now)
5. a widow for one year - john irving (i love the sweep of this one and although i fancy myself as ruth (there's a recurring thing here wherein i place myself in all of the novels), there is something sorrowful over eddie that i love as well)
6. the bean trees - barbara kingsolver (the quotes that stick best in my head are from this book)
7. one hundred years of solitude - gabriel garcia marquez
8. the unbearable lightness of being - milan kundera

favorite theorists

1. the indivisible remainder - slavoj žižek
2. problems of dostoevsky's poetics - mikael bakhtin
3. mythologies - roland barthes
4. after theory - terry eagleton
5. distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste - pierre bourdieu 

the russians 

1. the brothers karamazov - fyodor dostoevsky
2. pushkin house - andrei bitov
3. master & margarita - mikael bulgakov (yup, on this list too)
4. notes from underground - fyodor dostoevsky
5. pale fire - vladimir nabokov

best i've read in the past year

1. dance, dance, dance - haruki murakami
2. hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world - haruki murakami
3. the short wondrous life of oscar wao - junot diaz

non-fiction faves

1. black lamb and grey falcon - rebecca west
2. lucy: the beginnings of humankind - donald c. johanson and maitland edey
3. origins - richard leakey
4. devil in the white city - erik larson

ones which i've only pretended to read in their entirety (had to slip in a confession)

1. ulysses - james joyce (had a whole course devoted to this and STILL didn't make it through, tho' i wrote a great paper)
2. satanic verses - salman rushdie
3. the odyssey - homer (i've come closest to reading it all on this one)
4. faust - johann wolfgang von goethe

strangely have never picked up

1. lord of the rings - j.r.r. tolkien
2. proust
3. tess of the d'urbervilles - thomas hardy

play along if you'd like to make lists of your favorite books. and i'd love to see some confessions on what you've only pretended to have read. because you know there's something.

the things you hold onto

there's no place like home

i've lived away from my country of birth during the whole monica lewinsky thing + the entire bush administration, that's now more than a decade. people always ask me what i miss. and aside from my family, which is a given, i usually say, just The Gap. and i do miss the gap. except when they forget that what they do is make great hooded sweatshirts, but i'm confident they'll remember soon.

but when i think about it, there are other things. like hot rollers. nobody does hot rollers where i live and i'd like to have the occasional curly hair day (that would make my mom happy as well, she always thinks that a look is never really complete if you have flat hair).

and there's the fact that clabber girl baking powder is the best kind. we, of course, have baking powder too, but it's just not the same. however, our yeast (blocks of the fresh kind) totally kicks those wussy dry packets. and mom sends me clabber girl when i need it.

and although ikea now has a form of zip-loc bag available, you can't get that really nice little snack size zip-locs that are ideal for sabin's lunches. so we still import those.

i would say that i let go of other things in stages. for the first couple of years, i imported mentadent toothpaste. i loved that stuff, but now i've gotten used to colgate (because it's available here too) and i no longer need to use up valuable luggage space on that. i'm not even sure they still make it. i think i liked that little push thingie it came in.

i also would lay in a large supply of dry idea deodorant whenever i was home, but now i can deal with whatever's available on the grocery store shelf--rexona or whatever. it really all works equally well. (except when you forget to pack it.)

i miss regular access to vanity fair and atlantic monthly and the new yorker, but perhaps enjoy them more because i only get them once in awhile when i pass through an airport or city that has them, so the pain is less than i would once have imagined.

same with movies. i used to have to see every movie in the theatre on the weekend it came out. now, pretty much the only time i see movies is on a long-haul flight. and i don't miss it, not even a little bit. perhaps my taste has improved or movies have not. but with something like a new james bond, we do still go on opening weekend. (perhaps i should take a lesson from this on the whole getting rid of the t.v. notion.)

some of these are surely products of growing older, but they're also about the adaptability of humans to their surroundings. i have my frustrations with what i at times perceive as the impoliteness of danes, but for the most part, i feel i'm home. it's here my best and favorite people are and our home is filled with memories of our life, even if we use different products than i was once used to.

i think it was B who said it not long ago, home is where your books are. your toothpaste and deodorant, those change. and as you can see, my books are most decidedly here...

i love lucy

i've been thinking of lucy ever since i saw her last week at the zoological museum in copenhagen. it was, of course, just a replica with the bits filled in that were missing from her fossil, but somehow, i still find myself standing before her feeling awestruck.

Lucy (AL288-1) - 2.3 million years old

i think i had some distant knowledge of lucy before i picked up donald johanson and maitland a. edey's book, lucy: the beginnings of humankind from my father-in-law's bookshelves a good eight years ago. it was one of those lazy afternoons at his house in sweden. he was an architect and had designed and built the house when my husband was just a little boy and something about the design seemed to have bent time so that it felt like it stretched out to be exactly the amount of time you needed when you were there in that house. i was sitting in a low, comfy chair and when i glanced at the bookshelf beside me the lucy book fairly leapt from the shelf into my hands.  i picked it up and began reading. i read non-stop for the next couple of hours, husband fortifying me with the occasional cup of tea. i was transfixed. because it's a fascinating story, well told by johanson and edey.

they were digging at hadar in ethiopia in late november, during the last days of the dig season in 1974. johansen had lots of paperwork to do, but on a hunch, decided to go out with a graduate student named tom gray to survey locality 162. it was during the heat of the day that they stumbled upon what appeared to be quite an intact single individual primitive hominid. at 40%, it's one of the most complete hominid skeletons ever found. johansen lucidly walks through the tangled web of paleoanthropology and the politics of the naming and dating of fossils. it's fascinating stuff and has since led me to read a whole lot of other books on the subject, several by the leakeys--louis, mary, richard--who are perhaps the most famous paleoanthropologists in the world and one on the piltdown man hoax and one on raymond dart, who found the taung baby in south africa. paleoanthropology has a way of doing that to you, it keeps you coming back for more with beautiful fossils (like mr. toumai below), heated controversies and fiery personalities.

toumai (sahelanthropus tchadensis) "ape" 

6-7 million years old

i think i mentioned recently that husband and i spend quite a lot of time talking about evolution. our discussion these days is centered largely on what the next steps might be and whether we are part of/witnessing/being left behind by it. is there some step into cyberspace on the horizon...when will the 'net take on a life of its own (or has it already?) or will the next step be a cyborg? not really along the lines of bladerunner or even the matrix (tho' the matrix is closer to what we think is happening), but more subtle than that--starting with chip implants for faulty neural transmissions and the like. that's why i made the stack of books i did above. because for me, it starts with lucy, who, although australopithecus and not homo, isn't a direct human ancestor, she's part of evolution's picture and i'm very interested in where we're headed next.  and we can't really explore that without knowing where we were.

when i was a kid, i wanted to be a paleontologist/archaeologist, but actually abandoned the idea because i thought all of the good fossils would be found by the time i grew up. little did i know. i should have stayed interested in science in that way, because i'd love to be part of a dig, looking for the next link in the evolutionary chain, scribbling away and cataloguing my discoveries in a wonderful notebook.

i guess that's ultimately what lucy represents to me...the ultimate discovery--finding something that is so old and reveals so much, yet opens up a whole new set of questions that no one even imagined. pushing the boundaries of human thinking and knowledge, both back in time and forward. evolution this way...

making myself at home

my main weekend activity consisted of painting the low bookshelf seen below which husband brilliantly constructed out of MDF (that shit is heavy) ala handy andy on BBCs changing rooms. and then once it was dry, i got to put books and other fun stuff on it. and we finally got to finish hanging our collection of architectural drawings. my late father-in-law was an architect and he had collected some of them, which we inherited, but we've been picking them up here and there in antique stores for ten years now as well. and now, at last, we have a wall where they can all hang together. the more time i spend in the room, the more i love the turquoise-y teal color we chose for the walls. it somehow brings my molecules into perfect humming alignment. and check out this post for a refresher of how this looked last month and how it looks at the other end of the room.

i had three boxes of books that hadn't been shelved, but instead of putting random odds and ends on these shelves, i went to the shelves in the bedroom and got my best and favorites because they're the books i want near me in this creative space. i also unpacked a box of some of the wonderful things we've collected that i had forgotten about...small brass objects--a compass, an old timeclock that was once used to punch in in an egyptian workplace, a small morse code transmitter found in an antique store in iowa city and our scale collection and a little bitty samovar from tolstoy's yasnaya polyana. getting reacquainted with these long-packed-away things was a bit like having something new. i felt so delighted (and a little bit surprised) unwrapping them from their 18-month old newspapers (yikes!).

and now to the books. i brought out all of the russians...19th century on the bottom left, 20th on the bottom right. my beloved andrei bitov in a place of honor all his own on top right (in original and translation).  homer's odyssey and goethe's faust are allowed to stand next to the 19th century russians. faust because of an extensive paper i once wrote using it together with bulgakov's master & margarita (a highly recommended read, by the way) and homer because of a paper on angelopolous' fantastic film ulysses gaze that i once wrote for a balkan literature course.

and on the top left, my beloved theorists--bakhtin, barthes, kristeva, zizek and the slovenian school (salecl and copjec), plus a bit of lacan (which i didn't feel should be separated from zizek). the little rusty metal horse and bird on the shelves were found in a dingy market in goa and they lend atmosphere to the russians and the theorists.

so, although there's not yet heat in the room--the cute wood-burning stove guy will be coming in the next couple of weeks to install the new wood-burning stove--it's the space i'm most drawn to these days. we heat it up with a little electrical heater and candles and that's actually quite efficient, tho' it is a bit cold out here today because our weather has turned colder. next i have to make window treatments for the six sets of double windows (four of which are actually double doors, which will be gloriously open all summer), finish my fleece-backed cheater quilt (i did finish the top of it that one day that i wanted to, but haven't finished it finished it--i always get stuck on the binding when it comes to quilting), and make a few throw pillows for the couch.

another of the best things about settling it in today was cleaning the floor (both husband and i managed to get a few streaks of that beautiful blue paint here and there on the wood floor) and finding all of our assorted throw rugs. i didn't realize that simple throw rugs could be full of memories. like the main one in the centre, it's one i bought in goa and it's got the perfect shades of blue to go with the walls. and here in front of the couch is a little silk one i bought on my first trip to egypt 12 years ago--it turns out to be the perfect color for this room as well. and then there's the woven one with a picture of houses and mountains that i bought in skopje's old town from an albanian rug seller. it makes me so happy to have all of these history-laden things in one wonderful room. i'm sure that they will whisper to me their stories, nudging me to write them down as they remind me of the good times and they'll be here with us as we create the memories of the future.

stacked books and balderdash

i hadn't stacked any books in awhile, but this morning, these books leapt off the shelves and just stacked themselves. strange, i'm not feeling as bleak as this stack would indicate, perhaps it's just residual withdrawal from the antics of sarah palin.

* * *

for several weeks, i've been collecting those blogger verification words that look like real words. it's so much more entertaining now that they changed their algorithm and the words look like they might mean something. i find myself constantly scrambling for a pen and paper when i'm surfing the blogosphere, so these words are scribbled everywhere in the house..on the edges of newspaper, in the notes on my iPhone (for those times when no pen/paper were available), i even started a document with a bunch of them in it, but mostly, they're scribbled here, along with phone numbers and movie seats and journal prompts and stamped owls and the name of a fabulous chanel perfume, on a scrap notecard at my desk.

but, inspired by amanda's post nearly a month ago, i thought i'd make up some definitions for some of the ones that seem most fun.

cringo: i was going to say that it's what you do when you see a WTF Wednesday posting like this one, but upon further reflection, i think it's a curly-haired white person in mexico.

rhorifer:  a filter which clears away boring conversations like "do any of you ever use the highest temperature wash on your washing machine?" at dinner parties. i'm looking into a portable version of one of these.

domit: a small home constructed in the garden to attract hedgehogs.

menwisms:  the all-too-seldom clever utterance or observation by the male of the species. as in husband's statement last week while watching news of california wildfires on CNN that it so typical of americans to participate in global warming in such an extreme way.

brapigic:  that itchy feeling you get when you've just taken off an ill-fitting bra.

mismar:  to accidentally get caught in the waves and get the bottom of your pant legs all wet.

kajushin:   spontaneous squatting.

quinort:  an orangey-colored moss found at the foot of evergreens in the forest.  can be brewed into a healthy (if somewhat bitter) tea.

this reminds me of playing balderdash, that game where you make up funny definitions for words, at family holidays. 

tagged for a meme

barb tagged me (she actually did it yesterday, i'm a little slow on the uptake this week, sorry!) for a meme that's a bit different than the usual meme.  what you do it open whatever book is closest to you (not necessarily your favorite book, but really the one within reach) to page 56 and type out the 5th sentence, plus the next 2-5 sentences thereafter.

here's mine:

the next thing serif knew, he had a bride. more than a year later, he was still surprised how happy he was with this sweet young presence in his life. especially since she had just confided that she was pregnant.

(kinda fitting in light of my week, weird how that works!)

i'm reading people of the book by geraldine brooks. what i found out today is that although it's a novel, the sarajevo haggadah actually exists. fascinating. i'll share more as i go along, as i've just started it.

thanks for the fun, barb, have a lovely weekend!

i'll tag andi (because i'm sure she has lots of books nearby) and anyone else who would like to try it.

we likey the linkies

i have lots of things on my mind this morning. everything from the latest sarah palin-enduced madness (more about that in a minute) to the nobel prize for literature (more about that too) to iceland's collapse (i wonder if that means a big sale at magasin du nord?) to my new mac paint pots in constructivist (love the 1913 russian connotation of that) and blackground to going out for drinks & dinner with a good friend this evening to finding a cafe to settle down in to write this afternoon (i need a change of scenery) to TtV photos and macro lenses (more about that in a minute as well) to twitter (it's such fun--like mini-blogging) to a fabulous sandwich i just invented--tuna salad with roasted garlic pepper on a wholesome wasa cracker that's smeared with creamy danish blue cheese, to sitting down and learning to knit in earnest.  and that's an awful lot to think about on a friday morning.

i read this morning in information (the intellectual danish newspaper) that a former bush campaign guy (castellanos--guy who did his campaign ads and is now a commentator on CNN) says that sarah palin is the future of the republican party. i had heard it on BBC World the other day as well, but had blocked it out (the mind has a wonderful way of doing that with things it can't comprehend).  i don't actually know whether to laugh or cry. in a way, it's excellent, as it undoubtedly spells doom for the republicans. but mostly, it's a totally worrying development. if she is really the future then the world is in big trouble. or perhaps we are simply witnessing the decline of the american empire. i suppose it was similar in the twilight hours of the roman empire as well...watching a great power fade into if not obscurity, at least utter irrelevance at the hands of idiots. our leaders should have the cultural capital to lead and this woman so lacks in every way that it leaves me both breathless and speechless. i can only say that this morning's sorted book stack, which positively leapt off the shelves at me, expresses it better than i can.

so my thoughts moved on to the nobel prize for literature (which has nothing to do with the flower above, i just liked that picture). the swedish academy announced yesterday that they had chosen some obscure french guy, Le Clézio. what's interesting about it isn't that they chose some obscure writer no one had ever heard of or at least who hadn't really been heard of/from in years (they almost always do that), but more the hoopla surrounding comments made by horace engdahl, permanent secretary of the swedish academy, a few weeks ago about how the prize would not be awarded to an american because american literature is too isolated and insular. huh? tho' i have never been a big aficionado of american literature, i think some good stuff has come out of the US that would surely be nobel-worthy--think philip roth, paul auster, joyce carol oates and perhaps someone like jonathan franzen down the road, depending on what else he produces. but to call these writers isolated and insular and to actually say that they have an "ignorance that's restraining" is totally absurd. however, my choice would also be a non-american--murakami, murakami, murakami! strangely, the swedish academy did not consult me.

so, moving on...

my TtV contraption. 

it's a wonderful fall day outside, so i wandered the yard with my camera(s), played a bit with my macro lens and the old camera i got for TtV photography. i'm still experimenting, but got this shot of the fading hydrangea:

i do really, really adore the shape of my viewfinder on the old ideal. i am, however, going to be on the lookout for other options in the antique stores.

on that note, i will make my way into the city, find a café to settle into (without wireless, since the 'net is my whole problem) and try to get some work done.  i wish you all a lovely and relaxing weekend.