kom med mig... / come with me...

my friend christina and i have been planning an exhibition together for over a year. and by planning, i mean we made a pinterest board in january of 2018. we've put it off a couple of times because life and mostly work got in the way and we didn't manage to create anything worth exhibiting, but on saturday, we redeemed ourselves and held an opening - with snacks and drinks and everything! and i have to say that i'm really proud of what we made.

back in october, we had a getaway on the island of samsø, where christina's sister has a lovely summer house. while we were there, i made sewed up this little paper feathery dress that had been rolling around in my head for ages. once i allowed it to come out, it came out very quickly and i had it made in under an hour or so. i had painted abstract atoms on the newspaper and cut out the feathers in advance, so it was just a matter of coming up with a design and sewing it all together. when we were first hanging the works, i didn't think it was going to work as part of the exhibition, but was very happy that we found a way to show it as well.

the centerpiece was this mannequin with a spectacular headpiece/bird mask (more about that below), encircled by long banners of different scenes painted on old book pages and sewn together on the sewing machines in long garlands of 7 pages each. the book was chosen randomly from my collection of old books that i was saving to violate.  it was the right size and the pages were quite thick, decent paper and there were illustrations, so i cut it up and painted a whole lot of abstract atom-like shapes on one side using payne's grey ink. those abstracts are my attempt to try to break out of my fear of placing brush to paper and of making mistakes and being a bit more wild. it's surprisingly hard for me to do that. but after painting a 100 or so pages, i felt a bit more free.

christina then got to work painting her speciality - birds and bits of birds - on the other side of the pages - sticking to a limited palette of payne's grey, bordeaux and yellow, with small accents of a more true red and some black. the book turned out to be biblical illustrations and a retelling of the old testament from 1923. though the book was chosen rather haphazardly and without thought for the subject matter, the pages began to speak to us - causing painted wings to seem like they belonged to angels, rather than birds, and provoking christina to paint a few scenes with breasts.  i painted quite a lot of birds and feathers as well. and a whole lot of small boats came out here and there. i found myself surprised by what ended up on the page when i gave myself over to the process and let it flow.

we knew we didn't want to hang the works on the walls, but have it be more of an installation. we painted ourselves a payne's grey forest on sheets of plastic that's normally used under insulation in building a house. the way the light comes through it looks pretty amazing and we hung it in two rows so that it felt like you had to step into the forest to enter the world of the exhibition. we did one tree in bordeaux, which was one of the other colors we had in our limited palette. the limited color palette helped our individual styles come together and harmonize, despite the differences in the way we paint and the lines we put down on paper.

i spent hours cutting out paper feathers for this mask and enlisted husband's help in forming the headpiece itself - which is a beak. it was originally a mask in our minds, but ended more as a kind of hat. the creative process sometimes takes you in surprising directions. naturally, when husband got involved, he wanted to use wood (i had been thinking paper or maybe papier mache). he used a big hunk of wood and started off what ended up as an absolutely exquisite piece, by whittling down the log with a chainsaw. i wish i'd filmed that.

he also was the one to place the paper feathers i had cut out, taking ownership of the piece and finishing it absolutely spectacularly. it really was the crowning glory of the exhibition, bringing together our vision, which started with this video by thievery corporation. we loved the uncanny feeling of it - the way it was repulsive, yet attractive and fascinating. we wanted our bird woman to be the same, tho' she ended up not at all repulsive, but strong and assured, eclipsing our birdman, who was painted flatly on one of the sheets of plastic. she was the star of the show and although she is beautiful, she is also rather uncanny.

i found a dress for her in a second-hand shop - it had flowers that matched our payne's grey, with a kind of white slip underneath. once we had the headpiece on, the dress was the wrong pattern and took away from the beautiful headpiece, so we stripped her down to the slip and it was absolutely perfect.

at the opening, people could walk in among the works, looking closely at the details on the pages. people noticed things we hadn't even noticed ourselves. like wings on pages that spoke of angels and breasts on a page that talked about the lord's heaven. we had many wonderful discussions with people - about the creative process, about the biblical pages, about the payne's grey, about sewing on paper. it was such a pleasure to share the work and to see how it was received and to once again be reminded that ideas are always better when they are in dialogue with other people's ideas. our work became richer and deeper, even to us, when we shared it with others.

this little boat was another thing that's been in my head for some time and which just had to come out during this creative process. the paper is some very thin but strong chinese paper that we used to make  seaweed prints on the beach during that weekend on samsø back in october. i fashioned the small boat out of fine wire and just glued the paper in place. The boats are light and airy and looked just gorgeous in the window against the blue sky when i took the pictures today.

i'm really proud of this work and this collaboration. we had a few prints done up of some of the best of the small paintings we did on the book pages and there are a few leftover from the opening. i put them in my big cartel shop here, if you're interested in having a look. they're signed and numbered and will only be available in a limited edition of ten of each.

life lessons revisited

three years ago, almost to the day, i did a post on life lessons. on this rainy, grey, early dark (after the time change) afternoon we have going on, with candles glowing on the window ledge above my desk, and a contented cat in my lap, it felt like a good time to revisit the notion and make a new list. which is not to say that i don't stand by the first list, more just that i do love me a list...

~ words matter.

~ to appreciate the sunshine, you need a little rain.

~ time really does fly.

~ moisturizer is really quite important.

~ people will often disappoint you, but you will get over it.

~ it's good to see the place where you live through fresh eyes.

~ you grow more patient as you age.

~ but you also tend to take less crap.

~ you are never too old for glitter nail polish.

~ you are never too old to dress up for halloween.

~ nothing beats a logical argument. but those are few and far between.

~ so much of who your child is is already there in the child. it's up to you to nurture it.

~ everyone is pretending at something.

~ don't ever go to work for a friend.

~ a glass of wine has healing powers.

~ sometimes you just need girl talk (best paired with above-referenced wine).

~ it is possible to do something creative every day.

~ many of life's most satisfying moments happen in the kitchen.

~ spending time alone is good for the soul.

~ chickens are smarter than you think.

~ a good night's sleep will restore you.

~ there is always a good book to read, it's just a matter of finding it.

~ the internet is huge.

~ blogging is cheaper than therapy.

~ sometimes you don't know what you think until you write about it.

~ you're never too old to learn something new.

~ you can learn from your mistakes, but it might take a couple of tries.

~ it's totally normal to listen to the same song over and over again.

and that's my list. for now. play along if you'd like (please let me know, so i can read your list as well). it's surprisingly cathartic.

* * *

you never know who those people are.

morning moon

as a hurricane ravages the east coast of the US, it seems rather frivolous to sit at my desk, sipping a mug of tea, contemplating a blog post and the rest of my day and looking out at the beautiful, cold, clear, sunny autumn day that's going on outside. in fact, i unfollowed one asshole on twitter this morning for blithely posting crap-ass scrapbook pages while the storm raged (why was i following such a person anyway?). it feels odd that life goes on as normal while it's interrupted so dramatically for so many people elsewhere. but i suppose that's true at any given moment of any day. it just doesn't always make the news.

i feel a bit guilty for sitting here, brooding in my own thoughts, pondering things like how i lack a group of truly creative people to hang out with or how i will construct a paleo meal this evening when we have 15 more rows of potatoes to dig and use or whether i'll dare to remove the horse's stitches myself to save another vet visit. people have lost their homes and cars and belongings and the physical evidence of their memories and i'm sitting here with my petty concerns.

but again, it happens every day - tragedies, manmade and natural, befall people all over the world all the time and i normally don't worry about it. i'm only worried today because it's filling my screens and my twitter feed. i haven't even been to new york, so how can it really matter to me?

so not to discount the actual, real misery, but i think we should all have better things to think about. like how we can be positive towards that person who meets us with negativity. because maybe precisely what they need is a dose of positivity coming their way. maybe what would give us the most energy is to simply decide that we will give away all of the energy we ourselves have. maybe that's actually how you make more.

i realize this isn't making that much sense, but the hurricane has jumbled up my thoughts. or perhaps it's the morning moon. and i'm mostly left thinking we should just be a whole lot kinder and gentler right here, where we are now. and that it might make a big difference in the big scheme of things. hurricanes or none.

archaeologists of the everyday

each day, as millions of bloggers sit down to compose the day's post, we dig into our experiences and often, our photo libraries. why do we do it? out of a desire to share? to connect with others? to show off? to get something off our chests? to keep those nigglings of insanity at bay? to construct an album of a life? an everyday life?  russian has a word for that everyday life - byt' - which somehow carries more meaning - it captures something of the underlying sorrow of the quotidian sameness of the everyday. and also the kitsch that it contains. and the poshlust - which nabokov called "petty evil or self-satisfied vulgarity." because there is some kind of narcissistic self-satisfaction in all of this blogging and all of the pretty pictures shared on flickr.

we are such a NOW kind of culture - i say as if there is but one culture. but i guess i mean the culture of the interwebs. we want to share things as they happen - works in progress, often unfinished. we can hardly wait to share. me, i seldom use photos that are more than a couple of days old - i have a need for the documentation to be of now. we do 365 photo projects, where we document every day. and while i'm grateful for the project, as a repository of my memories, there isn't something worth documenting every day. some days, it's just a box of vegetables from the garden or some walnut (or pecan) honey. because not every day is filled with exciting events. these traces we leave of our everyday...what do they mean? and what will they mean to future analysts? are they worth analyzing at all? or are they just byt' in all its glory.  what, if anything, is all of this doing to art and literature?

heavy questions for a friday. but i'm grateful to dubravka ugresic's museum of unconditional surrender for getting me thinking again. (and sorry that i can't seem to produce the right diacritics on my keyboard to spell her name correctly.)

precisely this moment

 an early morning walk in the garden.

still. quiet. sparkling.

 the silence broken only by bird calls and the occasional rooster's crow.

the roosters have just learned to crow and they still seem surprised by it.

 dew-laden spiderwebs sparkling in the morning sun.

 and a clear sense of these precise moments as utterly unique.

 these fine webs have their glittering moment in the sun. 

 the light falling on them will never fall again in precisely the same way. 

fleeting, unique moments, savored fully.

it's what life is about, really.

still thinking about char

still thinking about char. feeling a bit better after reading beth's blog today. it's still not ok that she's gone and i miss her terribly...i had photo issues today and my immediate thought was, "i need to ask char what she would do." but i can't do that. and that's brought tears to my eyes more than once since i learned this yesterday morning.

this whole thing has left me thinking that passwords and last wishes about our cyberlives need to be included in our wills. i told husband that i want him to post on my blog, twitter, facebook, etc. if i die unexpectedly, letting everyone know. it's easy if he does it on one of my computers, as it all automatically signs in, so he doesn't even need to know my passwords, tho' he knows those too. but i would want to let everyone know what happened - whatever it may be.  he told me to pre-write the post, so he could just post it, but if i could predict the future...

in all of this, i am grateful for this cyberlife we have. i love that char's blog lives on (and i hope it continues to do so), so i can go back to it and read it and feel close to her and remember her. and i treasure every comment she left on my blog even more so now than i did. (why is that we most appreciate that which we no longer have?)

it all brings up interesting questions of the reality of virtual friendship that i'm not yet finished processing. i feel as bereft losing char as if i'd lost a close friend that i knew in real life, even tho' we never met. she was a wonderful person and i am grateful that the slim chance that we would find one another here in cyberspace indeed worked. of all the blogs out there, i feel richer for mine having crossed paths with hers. we share so much of ourselves here (tho' it's impossible to share it all), that we may in some ways know one another better than we know our real life friends. it's a privilege that i hope to be more conscious of after losing char. it's the least i can do.

sunshine helps

these days of endless sunshine make the world seem a friendlier, better place.
it makes it easier to handle all of life's small frustrations.
because they do come anyway, even when the sun shines.
but they matter so much less.
especially in the golden light of evening.

what you can't see is a bit of a nip in the air.
they predict frost tonight.
so all of the little plants are tucked in.
as are the strawberries, which are loaded with blooms.
it's going to be a great year for strawberries.

it's shaping up to be a great year for a lot of things.
but not always in the way you expect.
but i'm trying to let go of expecting.
and complaining.
and fault-finding.
and negativity.
and of fear. mostly of fear.

i'm not there yet,
but i find the sunshine helps.

i don't look like who i am

are you ever surprised when you look in the mirror? like that person you see can't possibly be you, because you feel so different than that on the inside? and do you realize that you've never truly seen yourself? it's actually physically impossible to look at your own face. is something missing in the reflection? sometimes it seems so to me. i feel so different than how i look. i don't really know where i'm going with this, it's just something that strikes me at times. that it's really quite impossible to get at who we are, even to ourselves.

ruin porn tourism

one of the few signs of decay i've seen in denmark

i love a good ruin...falling down buildings in decay are so picturesque and evocative. some of my most powerful imaginings have been at ruins...whether it's standing on the plains at troy and almost being able to catch the sounds of battle on the wind or walking along the paved streets of ephesus at midday and imagining john the baptist and paul (misogynist tho' he was) treading there before me or whether it's the old house down on the creek where my father spent his early childhood. ruins evoke memory and emotions and are haunting somehow. and even more haunting if the pictures of them are without people - making the building or place seem that much more abandoned. there is a lot of emotion in such photos of decay.

what does it take for there to be decayed buildings in a landscape? time, for one. the ancient ruins dotting turkey, greece and the balkans, with the odd column sticking up in a field here and there, are just part of the landscape - the history of the place, as the sands of time pass relentlessly over it. on the prairies, it's a sign of the consolidation of all those small family farms into big corporate farms. and there's simply not enough people out there to be living on all of those little homesteads anymore, so some of them fall into picturesque ruin as they bake in the summer sun and are exposed to harsh winters.

somewhere near stickney, south dakota

i miss a good ruin in my daily life. denmark is too prosperous, too middle class, too neat, and perhaps simply too small to allow ruins to stand. one of my favorite exceptions is the old windmill above. but i wonder how long it will be allowed to stand in decay. it's probably violating some or other municipal ordinance in all of its shabby glory.

i feel like i'm hearing an awful lot about detroit lately. it seems it's become the archetype of an american city in decline. famous photographers take haunting peopleless photographs of its once grand buildings in ruin. and those photos are extremely moving. when i see them, it makes me want to go to detroit as a ruin porn tourist.  i recently saw some photos of an abandoned complex near berlin that made me feel the same way. but what are the implications of such voyeuristic practice? being a visitor to a contemporary ruin seems much more somehow violating than visiting ephesus or pergamon or the acropolis. it's so much closer and more raw. many of the buildings in detroit were still in use up to the early 90s, so the wound is quite fresh in a way. and is making a photographic essay of those once glorious buildings, empty of people, doing detroit a disservice?  the new republic thinks so. and so do the people who made this documentary.

what do you think?

deep thoughts from a fevered brain

tangled thoughts

when you're lying around sick for days on end, you tend to watch too much television, since the concentration required to read a book, or for that matter, the strength required to hold up a book is just too much. and by you i mean me. but watching all that television makes you (again, really me) think about a lot of stuff...

~ like how you've always had performance anxiety when it comes to ordering in mcdonald's or burger king or those places. totally tongue tied when you reach the front of the line. and if you can speak, you definitely can't remember what it was you were going to order. (you = me)

~ the weird obsession politicians seem to have at the moment with apologizing. the former leader of the danish communist party is on the latest wave. he's now apologizing for having been a communist. since he's just a socialist now. as if anyone knows the difference.

~ the implications of the apology thing and how it indicates that politics have gone off on some strange emotional tangent. and that can't be a good place to have gone.

~ what happened in the mine stays in the mine.

~ speaking of socialists, apparently mario vargas llosa isn't one anymore and that doesn't please the swedish literary establishment. you're not sure you're that fond of the swedish literary establishment. you were just grateful you'd actually heard of this year's honoree.

~ that sally hansen complete salon manicure really stays on.

~ why is it that the kids from the most religious families are always the ones who get pregnant in high school?

~ can a fever actually melt the inside of your ears?

~ speaking of ears, can everyone hear that ringing in yours?

~ why is it that one teenager in the house can make it feel more crowded than 100 people?

~ how many episodes of hannah montana did they make? and why?

~ will it take WWII-style rationing to make us really and truly consume less?

~ can you tell i'm starting to feel better? (this time you is actually you.)

breathtaking

at any given moment, there are so many options we don't choose. what if, just for a minute, you could glimpse them all? 

turnabout is fairplay

well, it was bound to happen, after all those interviews, someone was going to want to interview me. bill, who you may remember as that guy from the minimum security lockup somewhere in the pacific northwest, sent me some questions. i have to confess that i was down to number 9 and when i pasted in the blok poem, i accidentally erased everything above it, losing more than a week of work and what were likely my best, most articulate words ever, thanks to an ill-timed blogger save. after lying down to make the minor heart attack pass, i managed to reconstruct it. naturally, i had to add a few pictures...but here's what i had to say:

* * *

Julie, I enjoyed participating in your Q and A experiment and I'm fascinated by your blog bravery to do an open request for interviews.  I don’t recall seeing it done before. So, a bit of turn about seems fair - here are 10 questions which I hope will enhance the blog portrait of who you are.

1. By birth you are a child of the American Prairie and, as an adult, you have lived many other places. Was there a moment when you understood the uniqueness of your heritage and what it means to have roots in the history of that region?

i think i spent a lot of years running away from being from a little town on the prairie. tho' i think i can honestly say i was never a redneck, i definitely know one when i see one from having dated grown up with them. the little town was very conservative and very religious (12 churches in a town of 1300) and i definitely fled that...first to southern california and then to the liberal environs of a big ten school.

i was fortunate to be raised by a liberal father - he always says he hopes that one day he has enough money to be a republican, but until then, he simply can't afford it - and a mother who showed me there was a world outside (by hauling me and my horse in a multi-state region every summer). i am very grateful for that, as that foundation definitely made me a person able to make her life in an small european country miles from the little town on the prairie.

i think that growing up on the prairie gave me an actual physical need for space around me. when you grow up there, in that flat landscape, with waving grasses as far as the eye can see to the horizon, you have an innate sense of space built in. i find that when i don't feel that space around me, i begin to feel cramped and tense.

i think i first became aware of what the source of the tension was in my first year in denmark. i was feeling out-of-sorts and generally uncomfortable and chalking it up to generally dreary weather, darkness and the coldness of the unwelcoming natives around me. then, i worked for a weekend in st. petersburg and i was walking down one of the wide streets of that beautiful city when i realized that all of that tension i had felt had melted away. and it hit me that i could palpably feel the vastness of russia around me and that i felt like i could breathe again. and it clicked for me in that moment that it was because i grew up on the wide-open prairie.

i think part of why we've moved to the countryside is because i'm drawn to that sense of space, but generally, i think my very being feels how small denmark is. there are only two places that feel physically as vast to me as the prairie where i grew up and that's russia and when i was out sailing on an LNG carrier. the sea, when it's calm, has that same vastness from you to the horizon that the prairie has. and i think that's the part that settled into my being from my roots on the prairies.

me at the foot of the divine sophia at ephesus (now sans fuzzes - thanks bill)

2. How do you see yourself? As a leader, follower, joiner, individualist, thinker, nurturer, experimenter, fighter, pacifist or whatever else one can be labeled?

any and all of those things at any given moment. but probably less of a leader, more of a follower, a bit too eager a joiner, a hesitant individualist, not much of a nurturer, a careful experimenter and too often a more of a fighter than i would like to think. but i can definitely say that i'm a thinker and have often been accused of over-thinking. blogging actually lends itself very well to that - i can't count the times i've started off with "i've been thinking about...." but i think (see, there is is again) the one of those things no one would call me is a pacifist. that's not to say that i am in favor of war, as i don't think i mean pacifist in that sense. i'm just not very passive. i'm too impatient for that. i guess i'd like labels like worldly, smart and funny. those i could live with.

gratuitous shot of our wegner Y chairs

3. Hypothetical question. You walk into a cafe and immediately notice people waving to you. On one side of the room sits Søren Kierkegaard, Simone de Beauvoir and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and they’re gesturing for you to join them. Simultaneously, on the other side of the room, Hans Wegner, Arne Jacobsen and Børge Mogensen are also inviting you to sit with them. Where do you go and why?

my initial reaction is to say søren, simone and fyodor, if only because i wonder what the three of them are doing together, but only if we sit in wegner's Y chairs or arne's egg, as they lend themselves beautifully to good conversation. but on second thought, i think kierkegaard's angst, de beauvoir's militant feminism and dostoevsky's religiousness would probably end up irritating the hell out of me (not to mention that i'm not sure they could stand one another), so let's go with wegner, jacobsen and mogensen, but we'll hope that poul henningsen and piet hein drop by as well.

here's a little sample of why we'd like to hang out with piet:

CONSOLATION GROOK

Losing one glove

is certainly painful,

but nothing

compared to the pain,

of losing one,

throwing away the other,

and finding

the first one again.

4. You’ve stated your interest in different crafts - paper, cloth, weaving and such. Additionally, you have a well written blog that's both intelligent and personal. I understand the time restraints involved but have you considered taking the next steps and moving from craftsperson to artist?

"don't mention the war...i think i mentioned it once, but got away with it...." -- basil fawlty

seriously, i think about this all. the. time. i even scribble down business plans and such. but it's plain and simple fear that holds me back. i'm afraid not to know how much my paycheck will be every month (you also, by my stage, have achieved such a ridiculous monthly salary that you are loathe to give it up)  i'm afraid to turn something that's fun into something i have to do. and those fears paralyze me. one of the reasons we moved to the countryside was to simplify and try to prepare our life for me taking that step, so perhaps i'll get there yet.

interesting fashion choices at legoland

5. From your photographs it's easy to see you have a keen eye but there's also some reserve or conservatism. Your photos rarely include people, especially people looking towards the camera (other than family and friends). Why is that and do you think composed object shots are good enough?

ever since i moved to denmark more than a decade ago, i have had to face again and again that i am more conservative than i'd like to think i am with my liberal arts education and liberal father (he once tacked on an amendment to a bill to make the fence post the state tree of south dakota - it was a tongue-in-cheek attempt to point out the absurdity of the bill in the first place, but seriously, no republican would have that kind of sense of humor). so my not taking photos of people is partially this conservatism, but it's also got more to do with shyness than you might imagine. especially of taking photos of people in public. as far as my family goes, every time i try to make them sit for a photo, we all end up frustrated and the photos are artificial. i'd much rather catch them from the side or in an unguarded moment than do actual portraits of them. i think the good portraits i have taken were all ones i just caught and not ones we posed.

edit: i realized i didn't answer the last part about composed object shots (i blame losing my original text. *sigh*). i will say that i've learned a great deal from doing my composed object shots. i've learned about light and shadow and how you often only notice things when you get them onto the computer. i've also learned about how you can achieve a rather different feel through processing that wasn't there originally and completely change the shot. plus, the rocks sit still and don't argue with me. but i will agree that part of the stagnation with my photography that i'm feeling at the moment is undoubtedly because you can only go so far with composed objects and then no farther. i think it's why i've been drawn to landscapes of late (which is also because we have a lake)...they give me something new but still without the people. i'm going to have to ponder a bit more about why i don't like taking people shots, i'm not quite to the bottom of that yet, all i know is that i've never liked it. i even had a friend back in macedonia who used to walk up to old ladies and ask them if she could photograph them all the time and it just totally made me cringe with embarrassment, tho' i admit she got some great shots.

6. Here’s another hypothetical question. You're dead and there’s a memorial stone (large beach pebble?) commemorating your life. On that stone is a button and anyone can walk up to it and push it. When the button is pushed, music is heard. What music do you choose to be heard?

the song that came immediately to mind is sheryl crow's all i wanna do. i'm not sure if that's deep or pathetic. the second song is madonna's express yourself. i'm a 90s girl, what can i say? i wish it was deeper or even more musical than that, but there you have it.

7. It’s summer and you’ve decided to take a hike. At the trail head there are two choices: One is a walk through a valley with lush meadows filled with flowers and birds. The other one winds under a forest canopy with occasional streams, small waterfalls and ultimately reaches tree line and there's mountains with scenic views? Which path do you take?

i'll go with the meadows. again, i think it's the prairie heritage. i think mountains are beautiful, but i don't have a need for them like i do wide-open spaces. denmark has nice forests to go for a walk in and i do love to try to find mushrooms and i enjoy the forest, but meadows, with the rustle of grass in the breeze, they just calm me. tho' i have also learned to love a harsh beach - not the kind where you laze about in the sun, but the kind where you need your rubber boots, a scarf and a warm jacket and you can't hear yourself talk because the waves are pounding on the shore with such force and the wind is really blowing. those can clear my head and calm me too (but that wasn't really part of the question, was it?)

8. Judging from your blog(s) you never sleep. With job, family and new property and house, how do you juggle what you do? Do you devote a particular amount of time to each of your endeavors? Or is it more spontaneous?

totally spontaneous. and i'm a night owl. i stay up too late every night, tho' by thursday i'm usually really tired and i go to sleep at a reasonable time that one night a week. i watch very little t.v. and if i do watch t.v., i'm always attempting to knit or stitch or paint feathers on stones while i do it. i also never put away the laundry and husband does the dishes. and the ironing (except the tea towels, i iron the tea towels). it's the beauty of being married to a dane - the males of the species are completely domesticated. that's part of why he's a keeper.

9. What great or memorable past experience would you like to re-experience?

two things come to mind, one is a train ride in the balkans in the summer of 1997. the temperature was perfect, the wind coming in through the windows of the train was perfect. i was wearing my favorite dress. the landscape outside the train featured ruins and farms where they were still using horse-drawn implements. i don't think i ever felt more alive before or since that night. i would love to experience that again.

and the other isn't really something i've experienced myself unless you believe in reincarnation. i've mentioned before that i'd like to have lived in 1913 - to have experienced the creativity and change that was in the air, especially in russia, in that era.  to hang out with the symbolists, the intense creativity of those involved in the ballets russes, the dramas, the salons, the whole aura of that milieu just appeal so much. even in denmark, at that time, asta nielsen was becoming the world's first film star with her abyss. it was such a dynamic, sweeping time. i would love to have been part of it. somehow blok's the stranger (neznakomka), tho' it was written a bit before 1913, captures it for me.

 The Stranger

The restaurants on hot spring evenings

Lie under a dense and savage air.

Foul drafts and hoots from dunken revelers

Contaminate the thoroughfare.

Above the dusty lanes of suburbia

Above the tedium of bungalows

A pretzel sign begilds a bakery

And children screech fortissimo.

And every evening beyond the barriers

Gentlemen of practiced wit and charm

Go strolling beside the drainage ditches --

A tilted derby and a lady at the arm.

The squeak of oarlocks comes over the lake water

A woman's shriek assaults the ear

While above, in the sky, inured to everything,

The moon looks on with a mindless leer.

And every evening my one companion

Sits here, reflected in my glass.

Like me, he has drunk of bitter mysteries.

Like me, he is broken, dulled, downcast.

The sleepy lackeys stand beside tables

Waiting for the night to pass

And tipplers with the eyes of rabbits

Cry out: "In vino veritas!"

And every evening (or am I imagining?)

Exactly at the appointed time

A girl's slim figure, silk raimented,

Glides past the window's mist and grime.

And slowly passing throught the revelers,

Unaccompanied, always alone,

Exuding mists and secret fragrances,

She sits at the table that is her own.

Something ancient, something legendary

Surrounds her presence in the room,

Her narrow hand, her silk, her bracelets,

Her hat, the rings, the ostrich plume.

Entranced by her presence, near and enigmatic,

I gaze through the dark of her lowered veil

And I behold an enchanted shoreline

And enchanted distances, far and pale.

I am made a guardian of the higher mysteries,

Someone's sun is entrusted to my control.

Tart wine has pierced the last convolution

of my labyrinthine soul.

And now the drooping plumes of ostriches

Asway in my brain droop slowly lower

And two eyes, limpid, blue, and fathomless

Are blooming on a distant shore.

Inside my soul a treasure is buried.

The key is mine and only mine.

How right you are, you drunken monster!

I know: the truth is in the wine.

-alexander blok

10. I said there would be no food questions, I lied. Can a guy get a really good Mexican burrito in Denmark?

you most definitely cannot. way, way, way too far from mexico. and there's a totally insufficient influx of mexican immigrants. and the danes don't realize it's just wrong to put creme fraiche in the guacamole.

* * *

thank you, bill, for these questions. since you sent them, i've been pondering that interaction between kierkegaard and dostoevsky and trying to figure out why i never take pictures of people. so you made me think and that's really the best thing one can ask. do be sure to visit bill's blog - just a moment of miscellany, he'll undoubtedly make you think too. 

random thoughts to start the week

~ i miss being in an academic environment. i miss the thrill of reading a really dense sentence and pulling meaning out of it that applies the world around me. i think it's why i used quotes from susan sontag's on photography on my 365 project photos during february.

~ husband looks like an entirely new person in his new glasses (must photograph him soon). but is it the glasses or his new job or our impending move giving him that glow? maybe it's all of it.

~ i learned that our new little samsung U10 HD flashcam can't really handle filming in the dimly-lit riding hall.

~ note: the flashcam doesn't violate the "not buying things in 2010" because i actually bought it back in december, but my sister only just sent it last week.

~ cleaning out the attic is like visiting a flea market and finding all kinds of treasures, only without spending any money. who knew we had all this cool stuff?

~ if you trip over a sweet little brass deer in the yard at a house you're contemplating, it's a sign, right? and if you accidentally take that little deer with you, it's not really stealing, right? since it was abandoned out in the yard at a house that stands empty?

~ one drawback of sunshine: it exposes just how much your windows need cleaning.

~ stieg larsson is sweden's answer to dan brown. only we won't be subjected to more of his hack writing since he died. but i'll admit that i like the characters of mikael blomqvist and lisbeth salander, so i (re)read on. sometimes, you just have to read trash. but arthur koestler's the ghost in the machine is next on my nightstand, so i shall redeem myself.

~ every day after husband and sabin leave, i think that i'll go back to bed, but i never do. and soon, i won't be able to, since i'll be headed off for work in an actual office myself.

~ sometimes i wonder if others can hear that ringing in my ears.

~ i packed marxism and theology books in the same box this weekend and wondered aloud if i would be going to hell for that (tho' thankfully i cannot, since i don't believe in hell and it's like santa claus, if you don't believe it in, it doesn't believe in you (thanks gwen)). husband's response: "god is more of a marxist than you think." and the more we discussed it, the more i think he's right, there is something of the new testament over the communist manifesto. i wish i'd written my dissertation on that. of course, i still could, since i haven't actually written it. yet.

~ i tucked all those little end bits of yarn into my scarf last night while watching hercule poirot (who is so gay, by the way, not that there's anything wrong with that). it was much easier than i thought it would be. now i hope i can figure out how to join the ends together when the time comes to do that.

~ i really wish i was on my way to the bookstore with trinsch this morning. she's going to browse books on new media and then she gets to write about it. i'm so envious. it leaves me positively longing for academia.

~ i do love these little random thought downloads, they just completely clear my head and leave me feeling ready to face the week.

deep thoughts

i saw an interesting discussion on the program univers on DR2 on the subject of people who are combining christianity and buddhism. there was a clip from the dalai lama's last visit to denmark, where he was saying that it's best for us to hold on to our religious background from the standpoint that our culture and sense of ourselves are so grounded in it. they talked to a woman whose home was filled with buddhas and jesus and mary icons side by side and who seemed like a peaceful, grounded, serene person. frankly, we could use some peaceful grounded serenity around here.

i've already been mulling over the whole religion question for awhile now, since spud wrote her god post. when she wrote that it occurred to me that you could be raised a church-goer without necessarily being raised religious. or at least you definitely can if you were raised presbyterian, as i was. we went to church every sunday, mostly because mom is the choir director and she had to be there. we tended to drop it over the summer, as we were showing horses every weekend and weren't home. mom's choir took a break over the summer as well. it's just how it was. dad went regularly only during april when he was an usher. mostly because church tended to interfere with football on sundays and being able to see the start of the games.

church served, in my view, a largely social function. i loved to dress up and we dressed up for church. i remember one year where it was my goal not to wear the same dress twice. and as i recall, i succeeded. we had a big fellowship hall at our church and the kids were actually able to do quite a lot of rambunctious running around. we had a wednesday youth group that took a yearly ski trip and it's where i learned to ski. but again, i remember it mostly as social and not as religious per se.

the little town of 1300 people where i grew up had no less than 12 churches. so on the surface it would look pretty religious. some were tiny little splinter churches that had broken off one of the others when something or other didn't function socially or they didn't like the minister. but again, it was a question of social relations more than doctrine. at christmastime and around the 4th of july, there are always community church services, where all of the congregations come together for community services, leaving aside whether they're bible beaters, catholics, dutch reformed or calm, understated lutherans or presbyterians. that was a good occasion for socializing.

i experienced some of the other churches, going with friends or a boyfriend, so i got a taste of some of the more fringe movements, where the preacher was a bit more aggressive in asking people to be born again and such. i never really got that, thinking i'd done quite ok being born the first time, thank you very much.

my sister and i weren't baptized as babies because our parents thought (at least at the time) that we should choose that for ourselves and know what it was we were getting into. i so love and respect that thought. and as a result, sabin's not baptized either. here in denmark, around 15, kids go to confirmation classes and they choose whether to confirm their baptism. if sabin chooses to go through that, she will also have to be baptized at that time. but at least it will be her choice.

the religion subject also came up of late because sabin has chosen to attend something called mini-konfirmand. the danish church, which is lutheran and a state church, is struggling in the face of irrelevance. people use the church for the big three - birth, marriage, death - but generally there aren't many who regularly attend sunday services. there is a very dynamic, lively woman minister at the local church and she's simply awesome with the kids, so sabin loves her wednesday mini-konfirmand sessions. they play games, build a few bible stories in lego and spend time in beautiful surroundings full of designer furniture and lamps (since it's a state church and the danish state is apparently keeping its assets in arne jacobsen chairs and PH lamps).  her best friends are there and she has a ball. so again, it's serving a social function.

one wednesday a month, they have "god & spaghetti" where you go as a family at 5:30, have a quick 20 minute service in the church itself (which is a lovely old building), christina, the cool minister, dresses up and pops out of a giant bible and tells some or other bible story and then we go over and eat spaghetti or lasagna and salad and socialize with the other kids and parents. and i hate to keep repeating myself, but again, it's largely a social thing.

but all of this undoubtedly proves what the dalai lama said about our religion being rooted in our culture. in that little town where i grew up, it would have been hard to be a member of the society without identifying with one of the churches in town, because it served such a social function. and i'm sure people there wouldn't like to look closely at it, but the various denominations had a definite class designation and hierarchy in the scheme of the social structure of the town as well.

so where does this leave me? especially when i'm in need of some peaceful grounded serenity? which is, admittedly, sometimes lacking in my otherwise extremely secular world view. i think that's the appeal of buddhism for people raised in western christianity. it's something you can do on your own, meditating on a pillow in your own home. it fits our individualistic view and can give us the space we need for quiet contemplation. i wish the program on DR would have gone a bit more in that direction. the woman with buddhas and icons nearly touched on it, but didn't quite. but the program did provoke me to think more about it, so i guess that's the best you can ask from quality television. i hope they do something about the old viking religions, i'd like to know more about those.

sunday morning theories

we sit on sunday mornings at the dining table with the fat sunday newspaper, steaming cups of tea and the morgenbrød that husband always goes and gets at the bakery. it was during one of these times that the whole blog camp idea was born. what we're reading always provokes discussion, this morning it was of trading schemes to offset CO2, how this government hasn't devoted enough money or attention to research into alternative fuel technology and on to how difficult it must be to write a feature story about someone who won't speak to the reporter.

on the table were the stones i gathered on that beach in norway last week.  husband was teasing me about bringing half of norway home in my suitcase and i was assuring him i'd left quite a lot of it behind.  since he loves to dig, i said he should have more understanding for my need to commune with the rocks as he does with the soil in all that digging. i philosophized some lofty thoughts about how the stones put you back in touch with something ancient and basic and make you feel some kind of connection to a continuous line stretching through time.

and i was only half-kidding, tho' i said it all off the top of my head. i told husband that it gives me a palpable sense of calm to find a stone that fits perfectly in my hand and hold it, feeling its coolness in my hand and transferring my own warmth to it (sabin just picked up this stone which i had been holding and it was still warm after lying on the table for half an hour). husband suggested that i start a new -ism.  rockism. (we need to work on that name.) i'm aware that there are already theories like this involving crystals, but i'm much more drawn to simple stones.

rockism would advocate the gathering and collecting of stones and of sitting around holding them in order to get in tuned into that line of continuity with the earth. because i swear that if the stone is right, you can feel the ur-energy humming and flowing into you through the stone. i think we're searching for centres of calm in this fast-paced life and that one way i find it is in my love of stones.

that's my -ism and i'm sticking to it.

ten years ago...

i heard on the radio yesterday that it was ten years ago that the columbine tragedy (i was gonna link to it on wiki, but i can't really bring myself to do so) happened. i have a clear memory of standing in a little studio apt. on the north side of chicago, watching oprah talk about it with tears in her eyes. just as it did then, it feels remote from me now. i can't even relate. it's incomprehensible to me and so far from anything i can imagine. i feel for those people, but i cannot even wrap my head around it.

but what it does make me remember is that ten years ago, i was teaching a course in 20th century russian culture at the U of C. i made the mistake of proposing the course together with a fellow graduate student who was taking his exams that quarter. it was a mistake in the sense that taking your Ph.D. exams at the U of C brings you to the brink of a nervous breakdown. and by to the brink, i mean over the brink into a full blown nervous breakdown that you yourself don't notice, but everyone else does. so i ended up teaching alone, which was ok, it just wasn't what i expected.

since i lived in denmark, i also foolishly accepted my fellow graduate student's offer that i could live with him at his place, since it was only 3 months. but living together with someone who has had a nervous breakdown that he doesn't really notice himself is, to describe it lightly, not healthy, so i got my own temporary apartment on campus.

that turned out to be a good thing, because it was in that little bitty apartment, within a block of The Reg, that i learned to make risotto, which is a skill i still enjoy. tho' it took several tries. i had no t.v., which was also wonderful. i also ate a lot of paté on crackers. because that's what i imagined that a graduate student at the U of C should eat. i still haven't decided if that was true or not, but it was decidedly part of my own engagement in bourdieu's cultural capital (attempting to raise mine, undoubtedly).

as for The Reg, i spent so much time there in my study carrel, that i began to glow in the dark. (that's the standard U of C joke, since The Reg was built over the bit where they did the Manhattan Project.) but seriously, being left alone teaching a course (albeit undergraduate) at the U of C, is no small project. luckily, we had modeled it around matei calinescu's five faces of modernity, which meant that we covered modernism, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch (my fave) and postmodernism (my REAL fave, at least at the time), which was an ingenious idea (even if i do say so myself). but my very, very favorite was sneaking in alcoholism, because of its importance in russian culture. vodka is a diminutive of the word for water, which illustrates its importance as a life force in russia and russian culture, because what is language if not the manifestation of culture?

it was both a great time and a stressful time, and i'm sorry that it took columbine to remind me of it, but sometimes you have to take the good with the bad. i'm grateful for the opportunity to say i taught at the U of C, it's not everybody who has done that. but i did. and so did obama. he's, of course, done a little better than i have, but i'm cool with that.

thinking and hyperlinks

as we've seen already this week, my mind works very strangely. i can go from a simple teapot to early soviet film in one post. and even (more or less) explain how i got there. and because i just finished malcolm gladwell's blink, i've been pondering thought processes in general.

consider the following series of pictures:

our brains are processing stuff in the background all the time. as an example: i tried to consciously note all of the things that went through my mind as i just went downstairs to pour another cup of tea--a simple and rather automatic act. along the way, i noted that one of the pictures in the stairway was a bit crooked and thought about how they get that way all the time because they're in such a high traffic area. i flashed also for a moment on the ruin of pergamon that was IN the picture and smiled as i remembered the heat and sunshine and how i was wearing white linen and sabin a sundress that day. as i stirred my tea, i looked at the skinny laminx cloth napkin that was sitting on the countertop with a sprig of evergreen still laying on it and one of my precious resurrection fern crocheted stones. which led me to think of the set of my own stones that i sent to margie yesterday. that in turn made me think of some of the stones upstairs in a dark corner of the bookshelves and i wondered if i should have included any of them. i went up, cup of tea in hand and looked at the stones and saw a shard of ceramic with numbers on it that i found on the old base in subic and i remembered the little bottle of sea glass gathered on a beach near there in the philippines. which made me think about how the treasured and revered sea glass is really trash that some jerk has thrown into the ocean in the form of glass bottles which then break and tumble in the waves until they are smooth, pretty pieces of tumbled glass that wash up on shore and which people actually sell on etsy. which made me think of my list and how i need to just get my eyeball pillows up on etsy already.

it has taken me nearly an hour to write and gather pictures for the above (while doing laundry and lighting two fireplaces and a dozen other tasks), but the whole chain of thoughts probably took under 30 seconds in reality. because our minds are fast. they link things and make connections. i've been thinking for awhile about hyperlinks and whether they map this thought process and reflect it. and that's part of why i set all the hyperlinks above.

of course the whole concept of hyperlinks is manmade, so it no doubt reflects something of a human thought process, since it is born of it. (why am i always getting myself into chicken and egg circles?) but is it an example of that sense i get of the internet as taking on kind of life of its own--evolving us (and perhaps itself) to the next level? or is it just a topography of thought insofar as thought can at all be mapped? how many thoughts did i actually have along the way during those 30 seconds that i didn't catch hold of, that couldn't be mapped? would my topography simply have blanks, or would i be able to fill them in if i could tune in to that unconscious level?

that's some heavy pondering for a thursday and i'm definitely not done thinking about it. how about you?