daily delight - february 28

here we are, the last day of february and the last day of my daily delights. maybe i'll even continue because it's become a habit now. today, there were several and i didn't photograph very many of them. warm, homemade, browned butter blondies, some time at the sewing machine, a coffee and a brownie with a good friend, where we got to laugh and complain a little bit and talk through a recent stumbling block we both encountered. it put it all in perspective to talk it out and laugh a bit. i also listened to a bunch of podcasts and made some really delicious mushroom soup. it wasn't as warm today as yesterday, so i didn't spend that much time outside, but the sun came out for awhile and that was good. i spent ages looking for my chekhov books in various boxes (i have a lot of boxes of books) so that i can dig into my new book in earnest. i read the intro to it this morning and while i wanted to do nothing else but read it today, i also kind of didn't, because i already know that i will feel bereft when i'm done with it. you know that kind of book? bittersweet delight. and that's surely the right note to end this month of delights.

 

as zeitgeisty as it gets

i wrote this review of the 1996 "classic" microserfs by douglas coupland on goodreads (hence the uncharacteristic capital letters). i'm too tired to change them all, so you'll just have to live with them. i loved the book. it spoke to my 90s soul. i can't believe i didn't read it at the time. if you didn't read it at the time, read it now. if you did, read it again, there's still something to it. and it's still about as zeitgeisty as it gets.

I read Generation X years ago and then didn't read anything else by Douglas Coupland. I'm not sure why. But in some sense, I can't believe I didn't read this back in 1996 when it came out. That said, I'm not sure I would have appreciated it then like I did reading it today. I accidentally worked for Microsoft myself during the early 2000s (accidentally because they bought the company I was working for, so I didn't exactly choose it). Not much had changed since the mid 90s, apparently, as the Microsoft he described was much as I remember it, tho' there were perhaps many more soulless cubicles on campus by the time I got there. I think the layers of fat in middle management he hints at were stronger by the early noughties and the Cult of Bill had definitely not subsided.

This book is dated in many ways - it's amusing now to harken back to Apple's Troubled Years Without Steve and the programming languages they talk about are a bit passé. But how prescient was Coupland with Oop! - it's Minecraft in a nutshell and those Minecraft guys are raking in the cash, albeit in Sweden, not in Silicon Valley.

And of course, the LEGO references throughout are nothing short of awesome in my eyes.

I wholly embraced postmodernist writing in the 90s and I think this is a prime example of it - I love the lists, the pages of code, the diary-style. It just speaks to me. But then, I guess I am of Generation X, so that's not much of a surprise. However, I also find it a bit lazy. Like Coupland included whole sections of his own diaries, filled with profound, but disjointed thoughts, rather than actually weaving them into a real story. However, this somehow accurately reflects how we are these days and that seems powerful.

It just speaks to my 90s soul and makes me want to dig out my Calvin Kleins and a worn flannel shirt and just sort of slouch around the place, lamenting the suicide of Kurt Cobain.

AND now to the quotes...
On LEGO (from Abe's Theory of LEGO):
"Now I think it is safe to say that LEGO is a potent three-dimensional modeling tool and a language in itself. And prolonged exposure to any language, either visual or verbal, undoubtedly alters the way a child perceives its universe. "

"First, LEGO is ontologically not unlike computers. This is to say that a computer by itself is, well ... nothing. Computers only become something when given a specific application. Ditto LEGO. ... A PC or a LEGO brick by itself is inert and pointless: a doorstop; litter."

"Second, LEGO is 'binary--a yes/no structure; that is to say, the little nubblies atop any given LEGO block are either connected to another unit of LEGO or they are not. Analog relationships do not exist."

"Third, LEGO anticipates a future of pixelated ideas. It is digital. The charm and fun of LEGO derives from reducing the organic to the modular."

"What do I think of LEGO? LEGO is, like, Satan's playtoy. These seemingly 'educational' little blocks of connectable fun and happiness have irrevocably brainwashed entire generations of youth from the infomration-dense industrialized nations into developing mind-sets that view the world as unitized, sterile, inorganic, and interchangeably modular - populated by bland limbless creatures with cultishly sweet smiles."

"LEGO is directly or indirectly responsible for everything from postmodern architecture (a crime) to middle class anal behavior over the perfect lawn. You worked at Microsoft, Dan, you know them - their lawns...you know what I mean."

"LEGO promotes an overly mechanical worldview which once engendered is rilly, rilly (sic) impossible to surrender."

"LEGO is, like, the perfect device to enculturate a citizenry intolerant of small, intestinal by-products, nonadherence to unified standards, decay, blurred edges, germination and death. Try imagining a forest made of LEGO. Good luck. Do you ever see LEGO made from ice? dung? wood? iron? and sphagnum moss? No--grotacious, or what?"

"We agree about the LEGO. It is too pretty to sell. Somewhere a few weeks ago, like a piece of DNA with just the right number of proteins added, it became alive. We can't kill it."

SOME OF THE OTHER GOOD QUOTES TO REMEMBER:

"We can no longer create the feeling of an era ... of time being particular to one spot in time."

"Palo Alto is so invisible from the outside, but invisibility is invariably where one locates the ACTION."

"I got to feeling meditative. I felt as though my inner self was much closer to the surface than it usually gets. It's a nice feeling. It takes quiet to get there."

"Flight Simulation games are actually out-of-body experience emulators. There must be all of these people everywhere on earth right now, waiting for a miracle, waiting to be pulled out of themselves, eager for just the smallest sign that there is something finer or larger or miraculous about our existence than we had supposed."

"In the end, multimedia interactive won't resemble literature so much as sports."

"I began noticing long ago that years are beginning to shrink - that a year no longer felt like a year, and that one life was not one life anymore--that *life multiplication* was going to be necessary."

"I also say the world 'like' too much, and Karla said there was no useful explanation for people saying this word. Her best guess was that saying 'like' is the unused 97 percent of your brain trying to make its presence known. Not too flattering."

"It seems everybody's trying to find a word that expresses more bigness than the mere word 'supermodel' - hyper model - gigamodel - megamodel. Michael suggested that our inability to come up with a word bigger than supermodel reflects our inability to deal with the crushing weight of history we've created for ourselves as a species."

"How do we ever know what beauty lies inside of people, and the strange ways this world works to lure that beauty outward."

"I'm coming to the conclusion about the human subconscious...that, no matter how you look at it, machines really are our subconscious. I mean, people from outer space didn't come down to earth and make machines for us...we made them ourselves. So machines can only be products of our being, and as such, windows into our souls...by monitoring the machines we build, and the sorts of things we put into them, we have this amazingly direct litmus as to how we are evolving."

"And the continuing democratizing of memory can only accelerate the obsolescence of history as we once understood it. History has been revealed as a fluid intellectual construct, susceptible to revisionism, in which a set of individuals with access to a large database dominates another set with less access. The age-old notion of 'knowledge is power' is overturned when all memory is copy-and-paste-able - knowledge becomes wisdom, and creativity and intelligence, previously thwarted by lack of access to new ideas, can flourish."

Lucky Charms are symptomatic of a culture in decline.

"There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything. Being able to find things is what's important. ... I think memories are always there. They just get...unfindable."

"Games have only recently been revealed as the passageway for the future of the human race."

"People without lives like to hang out with other people who don't have lives. Thus they form lives."

"Randomness is a useful shorthand for describing a pattern that's bigger than anything we can hold in our minds. Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make."

"Las Vegas: it's like the subconsciousness of the culture exploded and made municipal."

"I guess the number of things we build defines the limits of ourselves as a species."

"Las Vegas is perhaps about the constant attempt of humans to decomplexify complex systems."

"I guess it's sort of futile trying to keep a backup file of my personal memories.

Not at all, because we use so many machines, it's not surprising we should store memories there, as well as in our bodies. The one externalization of subjective memory-first through notches in trees, then databases of almost otherworldly storage and retrieval power.

As our memory multiplies itself seemingly logarithmically, history's pace feels faster, it is 'accelerating' at an oddly distorted rate, and will only continue to do so faster and faster."

"What then--when the entire memory of the species is as cheap and easily available as pebbles at the beach?"
This is not a frightening question. IT is a question full of awe and wonder and respect. And people being people, they will probably use these new memory pebbles to build new paths."

BRILLIANT RE: DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MACS & PCs:

"She's Mac, I'm Windows.
Entirely appropriate, because Windows is more male, and Mac is more female.
"Windows is nonintuitive...counterintuitive, sometimes. But it's so MALE to just go buy a Windows PC system and waste a bunch of time learning bogus commands and reading a thousand dialog boxes every time you want to change a point size or whatever...MEN are just used to sitting there, taking orders, executing needless commands, and feeling like they got such a good deal because they saved $200. WOMEN crave efficiency, elegance...the Mac lets them move within their digital universe exactly as they'd like, without cluttering up their human memory banks. I think the reason why so many women used to feel like they didn't "understand computers" was because PCs are so brain-dead....the Macintosh is responsible for upping not only the earning potential of women but also the feeling of mastering technology, which they get told is impossible for them."

ON THE GAP (the clothing store):

"You can go into a Gap anywhere, buy anything they sell, and never have to worry about coming out and looking like a dweeb wearing whatever it was you bought there."

"I figured that Gap clothing is what you wear if you want to appear like you're from nowhere; it's clothing that allows you to erase geographical differences and be just like everybody else from anywhere else."

"We also figured that Gap clothing isn't about a place, nor is about a time, either. Not only does Gap clothing allow you to look like you're from nowhere in particular, it also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present either. ... Gap permits Gap wearers to disassociate from the now and enter a nebulous then, whenever one wants then to be in one's head...this big places that stretches from Picasso's 20s to the hippie 60s."

"There are more Gaps than just the Gap. J. Crew is a thinly veiled Gap. So is Eddie Bauer. Banana Republic is owned by the same people as the Gap. Armani A/X is a EuroGap. Books Brothers ia Gap for people with more disposable income whose bodies need hiding, upscaling and standardization. Victoria's Secret is a Gap of calculated naughtiness for ladies..."

"The unifying theme amid all of this Gappiness is, of course, the computer spreadsheet and barcoded inventory.

"Deep in your heart, you go to the Gap because you hope that they'll have something that other Gap stores won't have...even the most meager deviation from their highly standardized inventoried norm becomes a valued treasure."

making things and reading

i made soap yesterday. i took the easy route, buying a shea butter soap base at the craft store, but adding honey (from our own bees) and oatmeal and sprigs of lavender i picked last summer and dried. i'll make another run of it this evening at a "make things with honey" event at our local culture house. i'm also making all sorts of yummy honey-related things to eat. i convinced our local beekeeper's association to show people the wide variety of things you can make with honey! i love instigating such things. the soap was super easy and i'm going to tackle the more difficult cold process kind next time - using oils and lye and time. i like the idea of knowing exactly what's gone into the soap. husband wants me to get very ambitious and make shampoo as well. but one step at a time. he's done a marvelous job building a room that's made for such projects (he calls it the brewery), so once the sink is in out there, i will have a place to do such projects, conveniently located right next to the honey centrifuge.

thanks to faithful use of goodreads, i realized that i can manage to read at least 100 books before the year is out. my goodreads stands at 84, but i also did my annual reread of the harry potter series, so it's actually at 91. to round it out, i dug around in boxes and found my nabokov collection, as i've just read andrea pitzer's the secret history of vladimir nabokov and so i have a hankering to reread pale fire. the three hardbacks, i scored long ago in a used bookstore in scottsdale, arizona for a song. i've already delved into speak, memory, nabokov's autobiography, and i realized that tho' i've had it for years, i hadn't actually read it before now. i wonder how many more of those are on my shelves. maybe my goal for 2014 will be to read 100 books that i already own. most of this years reads have been from the library, as borrowing instead of buying fits my current lifestyle and philosophy much better anyway. tho' it remains hard for me not to write in the library's books. if i only read my own books, their loan rates are going to go down and we can't have that, so i guess it will have to be a mix.

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if you love JFK (and i do), you have to see this collection of photos in the atlantic.

what's for dinner?

roasted cauliflower & brussels sprouts soup topped with grilled monkfish, bacon, kale and homemade breadcrumbs

we've been doing some heavy reading in our blog camp food & culture course. turgid academic texts about the industrialization of food (what i like to think of as the badly treated chicken texts) were getting downright depressing. so, we (and by we, i mean me) decided to go off-syllabus to get our food (and perhaps cooking and hopefully reading) mojo back. i've been reading margaret visser's much depends on dinner and the rituals of dinner (aside: i also tried to read her the geometry of love: space, time, mystery, and meaning in an ordinary church, but it didn't do it for me and i had to abandon it again. i can do that with non-fiction.) i've also just started erica bauermeister's the school of essential ingredients and really feel transported by it. anyway, i made a copy of the intro chapter to visser's much depends on dinner and asked everyone to answer that daily dilemma: what's for dinner? as visser says,

"a meal is an artistic social construct, ordering the foodstuffs which comprise it into a complex dramatic whole, as a play organizes actions and words into component parts such as acts, scenes, speeches, dialogues, entrances, and exits, all in the sequences designed for them. however humble it may be, a meal has a definite plot, the intention of which is to intrigue, stimulate, and satisfy."

now at first glance, i don't feel like i put on a play every evening when i put dinner on the table. a meal like thanksgiving feels choreographed somehow, but the daily meals we eat do not. there's more routine in them, less effort and significantly less food than a thanksgiving feast. but doesn't our daily evening meal set the stage of a life well lived? it says a great deal about who we are and what we prioritize, our tastes, our norms, our likes and dislikes. and it's predominantly me who is the director of the play that is our evening meal. i hadn't really thought about how powerful that is in shaping our identity as a family until now.

autumn salad of mixed leaves, roasted cauliflower, roasted brussels sprouts and pomegranate topped with seared, rare tuna

some days it's easier than others to answer the "what's for dinner?" question. other days, i have a pan of chopped onions sizzling away in olive oil underway before having a single idea what to do with them. i learned at a friend's wedding shower nearly two decades ago that something can always come of sautéed onion. fridays are easy - as i said in my post the other day, we have a friday ritual that we generally follow - fresh bread and yummy things to put on it. friday is also the day that the fish truck comes to town and i generally buy a tempting piece of something or other to use for our saturday meal - whatever's coming ashore out the west coast, but sometimes a piece of fresh tuna if there's no inspiring mackerel or monkfish and we don't feel like old standbys such as salmon or cod. i got a piece of grey mullet on friday and it was heavenly tossed with a few leeks from the garden and steamed in foil in the oven (i sadly neglected to photograph it).

fresh from the garden

i often take my dinner inspiration from what's in the garden. at the moment, that's potatoes, jerusalem artichokes, squash, leeks, kale and it was apples until we turned them all into 30 liters of cider last weekend, we've even still got a few raspberries going strong (enough to throw a handful into smoothies or cupcakes). we're trying to eat less meat and we're on a health kick for the month of november (which mainly means i'm not partaking of my daily glass (or two) of wine while cooking), so we're making even more of an effort on that front. i've said it before, we don't want to be vegetarian, but we would like to do better at not considering meat to be the centerpiece of every meal. that's what i love about the tuna salad above - instead of buying us each a big tuna steak, i buy one large one and slice it thinly on top of the salad. we all feel like we get enough to eat and we haven't each consumed a whole steak ourselves. it's better for us and for the tuna.

raspberries still going strong

some days, we're busy running to meetings and gymnastics and riding lessons and we get home a bit late, so i throw together a omelette with potatoes and perhaps chorizo sausage in it. i've been doing that less since our chickens were rustled. we've got new ones, but they're young and not yet laying. i hate to do it too often with store-bought eggs, as those chickens, even if the eggs are organic, often live miserable lives. if you don't want to slog through academic texts on the subject like we did, check out hugh fearnley-whittingstall's chicken out campaign. it was his programs on chicken welfare that first brought it to my attention. the industrial chicken industry is absolutely horrifying and means we don't eat chicken around here that much. i occasionally buy an expensive organic one that was ostensibly treated well (using it as roast and boiling the carcass for soup and/or risotto, thereby getting several meals out of it), but do my best to stay away from the water-filled packaged breasts.

we are fortunate to have a good variety of organic produce in denmark. i always buy organic milk, cream, creme fraiche, butter and lemons. (and i'm a bit of a snob about it, i'll admit, looking askance at those who fill their carts with the non-organic sorts.) i buy organic, free range ground beef and pork if it's available (it's not always in our little town). fruit and veg can be a bit more of a challenge as to availability in our smaller grocery stores, so there i tend to choose based on food miles. tho' i feel a dilemma on that front with regard to cucumbers - is it better to take a danish cucumber that's produced in an energy-hogging greenhouse in our climate or to take one that's been trucked up from spain? i'll admit i often choose spain, because the flavor is better, same with tomatoes. i turned my front entryway into a makeshift greenhouse this summer and we had our own tomatoes and cucumbers, at least for a short time.

tomato galette - with foraged chanterelles

our daily dinners tend to be a simple salad of some kind, featuring whatever inspired me in the green section of the supermarket, often rice (black and red are favorites) or spelt or rye grains, sometimes meat or fish, but not always. i do lots of stir-frys, these days with brassicas that seem to be in season (we're not fans of broccoli, but we love cauliflower and various kinds of cabbage). i even succeeded in growing a couple of heads of red cabbage in the garden this year and i've got kale there too, still going strong. i love to make risotto, tho' sabin's not fond of it. we eat simple pasta dishes like pasta carbonara or with pesto. sabin and i love soups and even tho' husband isn't fond of them, we try to make hearty, chunky ones so he's happy too. sometimes i boil up a big pan of beans and use them in various ways over several days - mixed together with diced onion, tomato and avocado, some chili sauce and a little creme fraiche is one favorite way. a one-dish meal if you throw a few arugula leaves on top. in fact, i've just inspired myself and have set some black beans to soak. i quite often make savory tarts or galette, just throwing in whatever is around.

mixed leaves salad with pear, cashews and parmesan

we don't often give in and buy a pizza, nor do we go out to dinner much. it's just not the way of the culture here and there is a distinct lack of inspiring places in our area, so we'd rather not spend the money on it. if we do eat out, it tends to be a posh sandwich for lunch in a café, but only very rarely dinner. it would probably be different if we lived in copenhagen, where there's much more choice. but generally, there isn't a big eating out culture in denmark the way there is in the states. there is also a culture here of buying groceries every day, rather than stocking up and having a whole lot in the freezer. i think it's because our refrigerators are smaller, but i'd also like to think it's because people are more focused on having fresh, good ingredients. i'm used it now, it's part of my routine and i actually quite like it. if i had the daunting task of going to target or whole foods for groceries every day, i wouldn't like it, but our grocery stores are small and intimate, so it's easy to pop in and out daily or every other day.

that said, i have a stash of beans (both dried and canned), pasta and rice in the cupboard. i try to keep staples like butter and bacon and milk and cheese in the fridge, so we can always come up with something for dinner in a pinch when there hasn't been time to shop. i always have a good supply of different kinds of flour and i make bread several times a week - often focaccia-style, drizzling olive oil and a sprinkle of cheese and maybe thin slices of serrano ham on top to make it heartier. if we don't eat it all, i cube it, dry it in the oven and make bread crumbs for other uses. either that or we feed it to the chickens.

roasted cauliflower agnolotti in progress (i've obviously got a thing about roasted cauliflower)

of course some days are more inspired than others and sabin complained not long ago that i was uninspired and never making anything new. so i've added things like homemade pasta to the repertoire of late. it's easier than you think and so soothing to run it through that little hand-crank pasta machine. we all need a little inspiration sometimes and we have to shake things up. i subscribe to epicurious and martha stewart and the kitchn's email newsletters, and i pin a lot of recipes on pinterest, both savory and sweet. cooking is probably where i'm best at using my pinterest boards regularly.

i don't know if my daily dinners are theatre, but they definitely set the stage for the way we choose to live our family life.

how do you answer the question, "what's for dinner?"

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minimalist fairy tale posters.

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the cat-hater's notebook was wonderfully illustrated.

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clever tiny homes.

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i'm in love with the idea of secret dining societies. 

sharing my eclectic book list

remember how i told you about my reading out in the corners? well, it's about to get a whole lot more public. i've made a reading out in the corners reading list and a cute poster for a display at my beloved local library. we're going to share my diverse reading list with the other library users. it will hopefully inspire and also inform about what a great service the library has for bringing pretty much any book you might want nearly home to your front door.

i generally read in english if i can - it's much faster for me that way and i'm more able to get things read in time to return the books. on the list we're making available at the library, the books that are available in danish are listed with their danish title, tho' part of the point of this is to show people how very much there is available in english! very nearly anything you want. they go to great lengths to get a book for you if it's possible - "my" copy of the humument actually was borrowed from a german library and sent "home" to my local library for me. i think that's awesome. it's a great service and one of the few things in this country (and probably even the world) that's still free.

i really enjoyed making the poster and finally used some of my hoarded pretty papers and ephemera. it feels like they were at last put to good use. i chose books that had recently been on my bedside table, as well as a few old favorites and the list is by no means exhaustive. here it is, including capital letters, no less:

The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community
by Ray Oldenburg

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
by Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel (Translator)

The Passport
by Saul Steinberg

Joseph Anton: A Memoir
by Salman Rushdie

The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath

Wildwood: A Journey through Trees
by Roger Deakin

Hornet Flight
by Ken Follett

A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel
by Tom Phillips

The Republic of Wine
by Mo Yan, Howard Goldblatt (translator)

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
by Slavoj Žižek

Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with Art
by Yayoi Kusama

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
by Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin (Translator)

The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen

The Bean Trees; Animal Dreams ; Pigs In Heaven
by Barbara Kingsolver

The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Kreutzer Sonata
by Leo Tolstoy

Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Tartine Bread
by Chad Robertson, Eric Wolfinger (Photographer)

Ukrudt - en kogebog med nordiske urter
by Rasmus Leck Fischer, Katja Dahlberg

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if you want to see what else i'm reading, hook up with me on goodreads, i keep track of it all there.

the view from sunday night or how i had antlers before they were cool

the air was heavy and it felt all weekend like it was waiting to storm. i(t) never stormed. denmark is very restrained that way. in south dakota, a good old fashioned thunderstorm would have blown through and cleared out that pesky, heavy waiting and left it cool and rinsed clean. no such luck here. the air is still heavy and too warm for sleeping. we can't even have the windows properly open as molly is in heat and desperate to get out to the papa kitty. we think she's had enough kittens for one year, so she's got to stay inside until it's over. i don't want to fix her yet as i want one more batch of kittens next spring - no sense bringing those good minnesota cat genes over here and not taking advantage of them properly. but she (and perhaps i) have been through enough for this year, so she has to wait until spring. she's lucky i love her or she'd have driven me completely crazy with her meowing and cajoling to go outside and rendezvous with the papa kitty.

i went on an uncharacteristic cleaning frenzy today, dusting, tidying, rearranging, organizing, vacuuming spider webs (they say spiders are a sign of a healthy inner climate in a house, so we're very healthy, let me tell you). i wonder how those spiders are all getting along inside the bag in our vacuum cleaner. do different kinds of spiders like each other? it feels good that things are tidy and clean. it gives me that essential sunday evening feeling that leaves me ready to face the week ahead. it's the last full week before school starts, so i want to spend some time together with sabin, who has been flitting off with one friend and another to summer houses and car races.

have you noticed that my photos and my words are quite disconnected? i took the photos after vacuuming up the spiders, otherwise, they would have been more connected. now i'll try to connect them a little bit more. i was out picking this bouquet of verbena by the road when i ran into our cat tiger (also known as pelle haleløse (pelle the tail-less) as he came home last summer without most of his tail) out there, relaxing in the grass and trying to stay cool. i was chatting away to him when some people came by, walking their dogs and thinking i was insane to be chatting animatedly with myself in english (they couldn't see the cat in the grass). oh well, they'll chalk it up to the crazy canadian, since it's rumored in the area that i'm canadian. i can live with that. oddly, i felt no compulsion whatsoever to explain and no embarrassment. i wonder if that is the first sign of madness?

i almost didn't have the heart to throw out these fetchingly dried daisies, but after photographing them, i replaced them with fresh ones. i almost think they're prettier when they're withered and dried. i suspect there's a lesson in that somewhere. or maybe i'm feeling philosophical after reading my fourth douglas kennedy book in as many weeks. tara suggested the first one (pursuit of happiness) to me on goodreads and that got me hooked. i devoured state of the union in about 24 hours. it's my favorite one yet. all of the ones i've read so far (i'm now on number 5 - the big picture) are about people whose choices led them feel they've lived the wrong life. they make me feel like writing, tho' i finish each one reluctantly, sad to leave behind characters who quickly come to seem like friends. i've got several more on order from the library. his style and characters suit my mood of the moment perfectly, tho' i feel far from having lived the wrong life.

antlers are everywhere on pinterest at the moment. i got this little skull last fall at the boy scout flea market for 20 kroner. i don't know what kind of deer it is, but i love it. all of the deer in this country are freakishly small and this one is no exception. i'd like to think that i was way ahead of that antler trend.

i read therefore i am

spud was wittering on facebook the other day about reading. she'd been listening to a radio program where various writers talked about what reading meant to them. i wanted to immediately go and listen to the program, but i stopped myself, because i wanted to think about the question myself, without the filter of someone else's answer.

reading. i do it daily. and i don't mean all of the reading i do on a computer screen - i mean reading with an actual book in hand. i cannot fall asleep without reading at least a little bit before turning out the light. sometimes i fall asleep with a book in my hand and wake up in the middle of the night with it fallen on my chest and turn off the light. i come by this honestly, as my father does this too. i think when he wakes up to find the light on, he just reads a little bit more, where i tend to turn off the light and put down the book.

and although i can see the convenience of reading on an iPad or other device (what? there are other devices?), i still prefer the heft and solidity of an actual book in my hand. and tho' i largely read newspapers online, i do also love the sound of a turned page and the smell of a real newspaper, especially on sunday. it's strange, i have a sort of separation in my head as to what it's ok to read electronically and what has to be read as an actual book - sherlock holmes, that was just fine on the iPad, but murakami? i want to hold the actual book in my hand.

as i've admitted previously, i am unafraid to write in books. including library books, tho' i've been trying to restrain of late. it was one thing to have a dialogue in the marginalia of the books in the reg at the U of C, it's quite another to leave my musings in a book belonging to the royal library in copenhagen.

i think it's difficult to say exactly what reading gives to me - especially the reading of novels.  i suppose it's largely a way of processing the world. of coming to terms with human motivations and feelings and reactions. a means of being transported to another place and time, to witness events. to come to a deeper understanding through metaphor (think life of pi, which is one long metaphor about humans pushed to their outer limits - tho' i hate the ending of that book).  when i read jonathan franzen, i feel he has looked deep into my midwestern roots and wrung the very meaning from them, helping me to arrive at a better understanding of myself.

from the mind of a seemingly rational madman like raskolnikov to the mess of madame bovary to the prototype of brave, independent, smart girls i found in both the laura ingalls wilder books and trixie belden mysteries i read as a kid...i found the models that have shaped my understanding of the world.  i would go so far as to say that my models of the world are built of the blocks of all that i've read.

i think literature can, like theatre and art, help us to a deeper understanding of events and people and places. for example, i have a clearer picture of the tensions that still exist today between china and japan thanks to reading the novels of murakami. and my love of the russianness and the depths of the russian soul comes far more from dostoevsky, gogol and bulgakov than from putin.  perhaps my lack of much of an understanding of the world wars of the last century is because i've never really read novels that interpreted those events.

i heard on the radio the other day about a small theatre in copenhagen that's planning on staging a play based on the manifesto written by norwegian mass murderer anders breivik. even before it's been written and anyone knows what it is, there are many opinions about it. mostly outrage. but i think it's a brave thing to do. not to give voice to that cold-blooded murderer, but because art - theatre, literature, painting - is the very best means we humans have to get at an understanding of ourselves. how better to come to terms with the horror of what he did than to explore it through art?

why do you read? and what does it give you?

reading and writing and reading and linking

i'm reading jussi adler-olsen's latest crime novel, journal 64, featuring detective carl mørck of department Q, which reinvestigates old unsolved cases. the series has already won a number of nordic literature prizes. and it is well-written for crime lit. i'd actually listened to the first three novels as audio, so this is the first one i've actually read. it's interesting how the voices as i heard them on the iPod, resonate through my head as i'm reading. apparently zentropa has bought the film rights to the novels, so they'll be making their way to the big screen at some point.

journal 64 is a good book, as it weaves historical fact with contemporary events into a very convincing, if chilling, fiction. nazi-like parties which want to keep denmark danish strike a bit close to home these days with the political rhetoric that's in the air.

but i didn't set out to write a book review here and it's too early for that anyway, as i'm only about halfway through. actually, one of the most interesting things about the book is the lexicon of swear words that adler-olsen has either revived or simply made up (fandenbukme, edderrolme, saftsuseme, edderbroderme - a few examples for those who read danish). i keep texting them to husband and he tells me whether they're something he'd heard before or whether they're made up. adler-olsen takes danish swearing to an entirely new level, for which there really aren't equivalents in english. it will be interesting to see how these words are translated when the novels come out in english in may (no less than penguin will release them). it's funny that it wasn't something i noticed in listening to the novels, but i've definitely noticed it in reading this one.

maybe because the book is called journal 64, which is actually a reference to a medical journal, i got to thinking about handwriting (you know, journaling). and suddenly, i've been noticing handwriting. and thinking about how it's often quite cultural. for example, you can instantly tell the handwriting of someone from the philippines. i remember twenty-odd years ago, i so admired the neat, pretty handwriting of my friend natz, and i can recognize the lines and strokes in the writing of my filipino friends today - it must have something to do with the way writing is taught in schools. there is simply a distinctive style that is filipino handwriting. the same with russian handwriting, even if russians are writing in english, you can tell they're russian. there's just a special russianness to their handwriting. i'm certain it's true of others as well, but we don't see that much handwriting these days, do we?

i noticed it again today when my latest jacabunny arrived...kit's handwriting on the package is so recognizable as upper midwest handwriting. it could have been written by any number of people from my hometown. in my own handwriting, i can see echoes of both my dad and my maternal aunt. so perhaps it's also in the actual construction of one's hands how your handwriting manifests. that might also explain the distinctive filipino and russian handwriting styles.

ok, and now back to the scandinavian crime novels...i also recently read karin wahlberg's pigen med majblomsterne. wahlberg is a doctor in lund, sweden, and apparently started writing to work out the stress of her real job. the novel was heinous. badly plotted, badly translated (from swedish to danish) and ultimately rather uninteresting. tho' i am a firm believer in writing to ease one's psychological issues, sometimes people should simply be stopped from publishing. i was happy that the book was only 69 kroner. it's one of those books where i wondered why i was doggedly determined to finish it. when will i ever learn to put down a book that's not good. somehow tho', once i've started, i feel compelled to plod through to the end, no matter how bad it is.  i also wondered how she got it published and strangely, it's not her first. i guess in the aftermath of the success of the stieg larsson books, scandinavian publishers are looking for the next Big Thing.

* * *

if you're interested in reading more about scandinavian crime novels, this blog is great.

if you want bobbaloos, stalk check here.

as for handwriting theories, i've got no links, tho' i'm sure they exist.

liberating beauty

on a friend's recommendation, i acquired a book called skønhedens befrielse - forslag til en økologisk æstetik (liberating beauty: towards an ecological aesthetic) by morten skriver. a book by a guy whose last name is actually "writer" has to be ok, right?

i felt the book started off well. it really spoke to me with its condemnation of the horrible conditions under which animals are mass-produced for our consumption and of the mind-numbing sameness of suburbia and mall culture. and the underlying message that we must return to a place where we see that everything is connected to everything else and the choices we make matter is a good one.

but. (you knew it was coming, didn't you?) but, then i began to notice that citation of sources was sorely lacking. i came across ideas and thoughts that i know i've read before other places (thomas friedman, al gore, denis dutton), but no credit was given. granted that these are not presented as quotations, but neither are they original thoughts on the part of mr. "writer." i think mr. writer might have needed to work with a guy named mr. editor, who should have flagged this fact.

a book like this is very thought-provoking, but it makes me want to read more. i want to know who he has read - i want footnotes and end notes and a bibliography. because i'm certain a lot of research went into this book and it totally spoils it for me that citation of sources is completely lacking.  does he really think ms. reader will believe he came up with all of this himself? no way.

and once these doubts about him crept into my mind, i began to see that many of his conclusions were rather wild as well. he lays out good examples of how our consumer society has pushed us very far from an aesthetic and ethical way of living but then he tacks wild, leaping conclusions onto them. he uses the example of the golf course and the uniformity and ubiquity of golf courses as an illustration for what's wrong and how far we are from nature. i think it's an interesting example, but i'm not sure it proves what he thinks it does. because i don't think that people golf to be somehow closer to nature - they golf for the sport and the competition, not necessarily to see grass, trees and sand traps. the notion is interesting, but his conclusions are all off.

but i keep reading, hoping i'll be able to see the sources between the lines, so i can go directly to them and read even more. because i think that this notion of a return to a more natural state is indeed a way of both liberating beauty and being liberated by beauty and i think it's related (tho' i don't yet know if i can explain how), to this renaissance of craft and handmade. we are looking to turn away from the soullessness of the mall and the giant supermarket and get back to something that feels more real and more beautiful - even if it's just rhubarb from our own garden or curtains we sewed ourselves. we are turning away from the mass produced and towards the unique and beautiful.

but, mr. skriver, shame on you for not citing your sources. you've done yourself (and your name) and us a disservice.

time for a quickie*

ha, gotcha there, eh? but it's not what you think, it's just a quick blog before i go back outside. it's kristihimmelfart here today and that's a holiday--ascention day or something like that, tho' i like to think of it as a day in honor of everyone named kristi who farts, because that's funnier.

i just wanted to drop a quick line about the brief wondrous life of oscar wao, which we're reading for our new book club blog--hermit book club. i saw it last month in a bookstore, picked it up, read that it was about a fat dominican kid who lived in jersey and put it back down. what a mistake that was! it's unbelievably good. fresh, different, very right now (in the best way). junot diaz recently won the pulitzer for it and it is SO deserved.

for me, who would have written a dissertation on eastern european postmodern literature (if i'd gone ahead and written that dissertation), i find that it carries postmodern literature to a whole new level. it represents a maturation of postmodernity which takes the novel as a genre towards its next incarnation. it uses some of the devices used by the now unfortunately dead david foster wallace in infinite jest, but either those footnotes as a novelistic device have grown up now or diaz just does it better. it's like an infinite jest for the noughties (thank you, guardian, for that wonderful word)

although spanning quite a lot of the 20th century (i'm only about 1/3 in--and yes, it's so good, i couldn't help but write about it already), it feels like it captures something of the zeitgeist right now. perhaps it's due to the language itself, i don't really know (as of yet).

but i just wanted to share this and say that it's not too late to join us on hermit book club when we talk about this book next week. run out, get it now. it's fantastic. and as you can see, it's possible to talk about it when you haven't even read the whole thing.

* ok, that didn't turn out to be that quick, but i'm leaving the title for fun, like jules did earlier this week.