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New Years Eve 2002 12:45
Weatther and climate are thankworthy topics
Weather and health, as well-known, are the most thankworthy topics, and almost everyone can have a competent word.
(Estonian Air inflight magazine.)
It's all about the "almost", isn't it, varied reader?
You will be astonished to hear that it is cold here, and that it has snowed. Snow is still a pleasant novelty for me and I haven't fallen yet, so I am happy.
2002-12-27 13:16 (UTC+2)
Twinkle twinkle, little tree
Allegedly Tallinn has had Twinkletrees in the square since 1441, making it the oldest such tradition in Europe. However, our tour guide was diligently pushing the Official National History throughout the tour, so this calls for independent research. Mr Hobsbawm and his friends have been telling me all about this sort of thing.
We also got the Party line on citizenship: indigenous "Russians" (by some undefined criterion) who pass a language test and have been resident for 5 years get Estonian citizenship, the fruits of which include visa-free travel to 47 countries (I do listen, you know) while the rest get Russian citizenship bestowed upon them by the Estonian government. (It is not felt necessary to consult Russia in this.)
You could say that this is preposterously unjust, and I wouldn't disagree. You could say that it's a necessary evil to preserve Estonia's glorious history and cultural, and watch Western leftists squirm awkwardly (which is always fun). With the clear-sighted impartiality which is the hallmark and birthright of the British citizen, I shall simply blame the French, damn them.
I'm not promising I wouldn't be amused by a scheme to strip UK Conservatives and Daily Mail readers of their citizenship - in favour of unilaterally declaring them Belgian - unless they could pass a test in, say, German, though.
Julafton 2002 12:31 (UTC+2)
Here too we introduce Estonia and promote local values as much as possible
It's the kind of night that's so cold, when you spit it freezes before it hits the ground
And when a bum asks for a quarter, you give a dollar: if he's out tonight he must be truly down
And I'm searching all the windows for a last minute present to prove to you that what I said was real
Yeah, something small and cheap and plastic, baby, cos cheap is how I feel.
Cheap is how I feel, The Cowboy Junkies.
It is a bit nippy out. At minus 10 or so my kl�der are perhaps daligare than would be considered wise, but I'm managing.
Tallinn is picture-postcard pretty; the Hanseatic style of pastel-painted wood dominates much of the old town, with occasional flamboyant stone towers, and the Very Russian Orthodox Cathedral for variety. Imagine if Bruges and Bergen had a child, and it was brought up in Russia.
The hotel has two French TV channels and one Swedish (with subtitles, which are doing an excellent job of reminding me that I read the language a whole lot better than I hear it) and I'm reading Jakobson and Hobsbawn in the long dark evenings. The most surprising thing about the Hobsbawm is how well written it is, and from the Eighties, yet.
But I have to snatch - and pay for - computer time, so no deep meditations for you today, Varied Reader. Instead, I reiterate my wishing of the best of possible wishes for you and yours Twinkletree-wise, and I shall be back not before the 27th, and not much after, if I know me.
2002-12-20 18:11 (UTC)
We wish you a very something,
We wish you a very something,
And a something else, too."
[Trad., arranged Gumby]
In case I don't manage to blog before, that is. But it has been said
unto me, and more times that once has it been said, that Tallinn is
not the largest or most diverting place in the known universe, nor its
people among the chattiest one may encounter.
So I may yet have occasion to locate an Internet enabled entity to
share with you my many thrilling insights and observations.
And remember, persons - the world would be a nicer place if everyone
were nicer to each other. Why not bear that in mind, this
Twinkletree? And two, three, four
We all like figgy pudding,
We all like figgy pudding,
We all like figgy pudding,
So bring some out here...
2002-12-20 12:12 (UTC)
After work today I head up to London to my mum's place, from which we
will be heading for sunny Tallinn tomorrow. Big Sis will be turning
up by train from Moscograd, at some point.
The big question about any travel opportunity, for me, is what books
to take. This is not less the case because I do not expect to read
most of them - indeed this merely enhances the semiotic intensity of
the simply having them with you.
So, because I'm short of time and ideas, and because I don't eat
breakfast, here's the Des Travel Library (Estonia 2002/3 edition):
- Lonely Planet Scandewegian and Baltic Yoorp
- Lonely Planet Baltic Phrasebook
- Lonely Planet Russian Phrasebook (2nd edition, 1995)
- La pens�e sauvage, Claude L�vi-Strauss [It's already clear
that Totemisme was the apperatif - this is dinner.]
- La ph�nomenologie, Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard [This is a
benchmark of my grasp of philosophical French. I have read parts of
it several times, but not yet reached the end.]
- Six le�ons sur le son et le sens, Roman Jakobson [Jakobson
didn't write books, so this is a rare and welcome overview of his version of
structuralism. Preface by L�vi-Strauss, all grace and courtly refinement.]
- Super-Cannes, J G Ballard [Ballard is the pretty much the
only living British novelist of any consequence.]
- The Invention of Tradition, Hobsbawm & Ranger (Eds.)
I think I may have over-egged the pretentiosity pudding on this one,
frankly.
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2002-12-19 14:03 (UTC)
While I was away most of the visits to the 'bladet were brought to me
by google and the key words princessan, madeleine and
nobel. Being away and approximately incommunicado, I missed
all the coverage in the tidningar, but today's Point de Vue
brings me bang up to date:
Madeleine wore a red frock. I repeat, Madeleine wore a red
frock.
D�collet� just the dignified side of undignified - not that I noticed,
of course.
In other news, the Kronprinsfredengagementannouncement appears to be
inching (centimetring?) closer:
De jour en jour, l'annonce des fian�ailles du Prince h�retier Frederik
de Danemark avec sa belle Australienne Mary Donaldson apparait
imminente.
[PdV]
KPF having met the parents, you see. (Actually I think that may
have been a prospective step-mother-in-law, but my enthusiasm for
details is not infinite.)
Also, Vickan speaks
open-heartedly of her love life, at least if "I'll make an
announcement when there's something to announce" counts as
open-hearted in your universe.
And last, and very probably least although there's a sweet photo of
Her Herselfness, six out of ten Norwegians
think that
Mette-Marit will neglect to produce an heir in the forthcoming
calendar year. Opinion polls didn't enter into it the last time
I was briefed on the making of babies but perhaps they do
things differently in Norway.
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2002-12-19 10:55 (UTC)
I read in the Grauniad a while ago that none of Simenon's Maigret
novels (or any of the others for that matter) were currently in print
in the UK - he wrote so much that the catalogue cannot profitably
sustain itself, and there is no obvious subset of highlights. Penguin
has come up with a plan though - it's going to release six in the
Modern Classics series, and when those sell out they'll be replaced by
six different ones, whereupon lathering, rinsing and especially repeating
will ensue.
So I figured that was a deadline ("Of course, when I started
reading them, there weren't any translations in print.") and
the plane trip home provided an opportunity to get stuck into Maigret et
l'affaire Nahour, which I have now finished.
It's good solid stuff - if it lacks the puzzleiciousness of primetime
Agatha Christie or Ngaio Marsh, then at least it dates from the
pre-serial killer days of crime fiction, when a single death was still
a tragedy and Maigret is an agreeable sleuth - his world-weariness has
not quite overcome his idealism, and he drinks an impressive quantity
of beer on duty.
And there are gazillions of them in French, and they're cheap and
easy to read. They are thuswisely duly appointed as a
literary junk food of choice, hos Des, with the added bonus that the large
quantities of French dialogue may do me some good - conversation is
far from my strongest point in the language.
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2002-12-18 14:12 (UTC)
I don't watch TV in the UK, and after a desultory flick through the
cabloid facilitations in Key Largo (thought experiment: imagine what
would happen if an European country of your choice devoted half its
airspace to channels in the tonguage of immigrants, but be sure to
have plenty of imaginary riot police on hand first) I didn't bother
there, either. So the Airport CNN that was thoughtfully laid on in
lieu of boarding informations was the scariest TV thing I saw. It was
pretty scary - it covered the US, and such parts of the rest of the
world as bore immediately on USian foreign policy: a segment on the
lack of German enthusiasm for war with Iraq was trailed with the title
"Germany: Friend or Foe?". Which makes it all the more ironic that
all the Merkins I got to have hung out with met my exacting standards
of political sanity.
Also, I got to read a copy of National Enquirer in the land of
its birth - there's a UK edition which I used to read while doing my
laundry in the days when my gossip needs were not primarily met by
Scandiwegian tabloids. The media vacuum in which I am packed to
preserve freshness and taste ensured that I had no idea who the
alleged celebrities were, which made their antics restfully
uninvolving. I'm not sure I like the Merkin edition quite as much,
but it may just be that I've Moved On. It's not you, National
Enquirer - it's me.
Since I'm back but I'm still pretty wiped out I've just wented to the
library, by way of a restorative pilgrimage. The library is hands
down the best perk of this gig, I'll have you know, and I do not
exclude warm winter dives on coral reefs. On previous visits I had
not noticed the full extent of the philological journals it carried;
in particular I had missed
�tudes Germaniques (Revue trimestrielle de la Soci�t� des
�tudes Germaniques), which is the natural habitat of Francophone
Scaniwegiology amongst other things. One particular other thing is
the article �Peut-on traduire les philosophes allemands?� in the
current issue by Yves-Jean HARDER (for it is he!) - hard to resist for
anyone whom the Amazon.fr fairy brought a copie of J�rgen Habermas's
connaissance et int�r�t while they were away in Florida.
So give it to us, Yves-Jean, and give it to us straight: can one or
can't one?
C'est un fait incontestable�: on ne saurait �tudier s�rieusement la
philosophie allemande sans apprendre l'allemand, ni recourir au texte
m�me�.
Is that a "non" then, Y-J, huh, is it? Mais, non�!
Mais cela ne signifie pas pour autant que la traduction soit inutile
et doive s'effacer devant la texte�.
Well, I'm glad we've got that cleared up, at any rate.
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2002-12-18 09:53 (UTC)
Since the dawn of time, Man has aspired to fly like the birds.
No, hold on, that's not it.
Oceans. They're big, and they're wet. Majestically big and awesomely
wet. The wetness is largely caused by water - oceans are full of
water - and the bigness is the result of the amount of water
- there's a lot of it.
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2002-12-17 16:13 (UTC)
Saturday was good. Since you missed my live-from-the-'puter
Powerpointing, please accept this bullet-pointed Saturday description
in recompense.
- My breakfast meeting was cancelled, and after the
purely social substitute it emerged that someone had mistaken me for
my boss who is very eminent, whereas I am not.
-
It was a leeezhure day, also, with a choice of activities.
Those of us who chose to get the boat out and snorkel in
crystal-clear, bath-temperature water over a spectacular coral reef
had no reason to regret their choice - it was terrific, even though I
am unaccustomed to breathing through a plastic tube and my leg hurt.
-
Then we coached for two hours to Key West, which is a tacky dump with
very in-your-face buskers but still preferable to the Costa del
Concrete.
- There was an American in our party who had married a
Norwegian and moved to Oslo, and complained about
- the difficulties of cycling in Oslo (especially in Winter),
- the rightist bias in the Economist, and
- (Shame! Shame!) the pointlessness of the Norwegian Royal
Family.
Apparently my enthusiasm for VG, Se og H�r and prinsessor
conclusively identifies me as "not American" (chiz chiz. Not!) as does
the fact that the non-native English speakers found my accent
difficult to cope with.
-
The senior oceanographer I sat next to for the Posh Dinner in
Key West turned out to be a native Swedish speaker, so I've now logged
more native-speaker Swedish conversation time in Florida than
everywhere else in the world put together.
-
Dessert featured Key Lime Pie, of course. When I asked where exactly
Key Lime was, people adopted the tone appropriate to explanations for
the benefit of a simpleton and told me there wasn't any such place.
- And I got carded, again. Don't be fooled by my boyish good looks, persons, I am certifiably in my 30:s.
[Permalink]
2002-12-17 13:42 (UTC)
Back in Britain
Brrr! I'm all red-eyed and boggle-headed, but I'm back. Did you know there's a wider selection of French magazines at Miami airport than at Heathrow Terminal 3?
I'll travelogue later; first I need some lunch and this week's Point de Vue.
Friday Jetlag o'clock
Jetlag sucks ass, y'all hear me?
Everyone keeps telling me Key Largo ain't representative of the US, as if I thought there was such a thing in the first place.
Also they keep having meetings that go on to 2 in the morning (my body time) and then saying "You tired? Let's continue over breakfast. 8?".
But I gave the talk, and I think I did OK. Especially considering I didn't write it, and I only saw it the day before and I was talking to a room full of experts in a subject I've never studied.
It's hot outside - shorts and T-shirt weather, so naturally the aircon is set to "stupidly cold". We have tomorrow "off"; we're all snorkelling as a bonding exercise, in between meetings.
Oh, and the resignation of Henry the Brain-Eating Zombie War Criminal has been met with not inconsiderable pleasure and relief by everyone I know here, and they ain't no leftniks, I'm tellin' ya.
Friday 13th December Lunchtime
I'm warm and I'm salty and I'm right outside your door
Yeah I'm warm and salty and I'm right outside your door
Let me do for you what the sea does to the shore
Florida Blues, Blind Spacefish Slim.
Which is to say that I'm here, but there's a shortage of network. More when I get a chance.
2002-12-10 16:02 (UTC)
It's actually snowing! This is rare in the south-west of England, and
will without any doubt at all cause absolute chaos. (The local
newspaper had snow-themed headlines for a week, last time.)
I bless the weather gods that bring me sn�, and I bless (in advance)
the travel gods that will whisk me away to the beach instead, assuming
my smugness doesn't get me beaten to death by m'colleagues which are
not going nowhere.
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2002-12-10 13:47 (UTC)
Really? How does it smell?
No, that's not it. I didn't choose the name, Varied Reader, cross my
heart and hope to die I didn't.
Tanngrisnr [lit. "toothgrinder"], maybe, but Thor?!
By O�in's hairy arse-crack I say thee nay!
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2002-12-10 12:57 (UTC)
(You heard it here first.)
And substantially cheaper:
Like many 25-year-olds, when I was in the UK I could hardly afford to
leave home. In Hertfordshire, I had a tiny flat for UKP 650 a month; here
I've got a big apartment - with a private sauna - for about UKP 330 a
month. And I can travel 200km for �12; it cost me that to go 50km from
Hitchin to London.
When Scandiwegia is cheaper than the UK it really is time to learn
Finnish...
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2002-12-10 10:23 (UTC)
That's how I remembered the question, but as usual Google knows
better:
My husband, T.S. Eliot, loved to recount how late one evening he
stopped a taxi. As he got in, the driver said: "You're T.S. Eliot."
When asked how he knew, he replied: "Ah, I've got an eye for a
celebrity. Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I
said to him: 'Well, Lord Russell, what's it all about,' and, do you
know, he couldn't tell me."
[Valerie Eliot]
Bibliographic details here, along with more
taxi-flavoured hilarity than you could shake a Princess Whichever von
Thurn and Taxis at, although I fully intend to try.
[Permalink]
2002-12-09 21:14
Aftonbladet (hoorah!) has a Flash thingy on the Nobel
dinner arrangements. The crucial seating arrangement displayifier
doesn't seem to like my Linux Flash viewer, sadly, but I can tell you
that Her (newly single) Beigeness Prinsessan Madeleine is placed next
to (currently divorcing) Statsminister G�ran Persson.
While we're on the subject, though, who would you pick as the worst
Nobel Literature Prize winner? I've always assumed Hesse was a
shoe-in, based on Siddharta and Journey to the East - I
figured The Glass Bead Game wasn't worth the risk after those
two - but I've never read Sinclair Lewis. Was he really that bad?
[Permalink]
2002-12-09 17:34 (UTC)
Which is more non-linear, an x-squared term or an
x-cubed term?
(Neither, of course.)
And the boss finally conceded that bifurcation theory mostly comes
down to singularity theory, which used to be called catastrophe theory
when it had a brief vogue with social scientists in kipper ties, and
was thus the predecessor of all that fuss about chaos and
butterflapping hurricanation in more senses than just being drooled
over by the fashionably clueless, but also that, too, as well.
Is it because if you read your notes between seminar meetings
you would understand the subject that you came to see me?
(I'm too Chomsky for my shrink / too Chomsky, I think...)
Incidentally, there's new fr.sci.linguistique newsfroup
to play with, although my newsfeed doesn't have the fr.
hierarchy (we don't take much to forrins, yere in Anglophonia, ee
knows; keeps usselves to usselves, we does) so I have to subscribe via
a non-posting freeswerver instead. (Well, no, I don't have
to, but.)
[Permalink]
2002-12-09 16:31
My editing of old posts is pretty much restricted to correcting
spelling and grammar anyway, but just now Diaryland won't even let me
do that, and Lord knows it needs to be done. Can we all assume that
any stylistic infelicities in today's monsterpost were a result of my
insistence on publishing only the zerothest of drafts, fresh from my
fingers' frolicks? Thanks everso. (It's gospel truth, if that
helps.)
But I lately I have been feeling the urge to try my hand at longer
pieces. More pretentious pieces. Redrafted pieces.
It could also just be wind, of course, this "urge". But I think I
shall formally announce, so that I can hold myself to it, the
Officially Impending Immanence of the Desbladet Colour Supplement,
incorporating the von Bladet Review of Books. In such place as this
will come to be, shall I place such longer and more thoughtful
meditations as I find myself capable of.
Desbladet quotidian will continue here unchanged, of course, although
I may or may not manage to update from the stormy, snowed-covered
coasts of Florida or the bars of sunny Estonia.
[Permalink]
2002-12-09 11:59
[Update: Links fixed, &c. Finally.]
Godwin's Law prov. [Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows
longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler
approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this
occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has
automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law
thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread
length in those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized
codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in
order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.
And now Godwin's law, the book: Nicholas Lezard
reviews
Slavoj Zizek's Did somebody say totalitarianism?:
Zizek's book would appear from its cover to offer detail to that
argument which, in shorthand, goes "the first person to mention the
Nazis loses". Did Somebody Say... proposes that when someone in a
liberal democracy designates something as totalitarianism, nothing
useful is being said about it, except as an indication of what gives
the liberal democrat the heebie-jeebies.
Nicholas Lezard's "paperback of the week" column in the Saturday
Guardian has made him my book-recommender of choice, at least among
the print media. Choices have ranged widely, from Burton's Anatomy
of Melancholy to modern poetry, to the Preacher series of
graphic novels (each successive volume as they came out, in fact) and
the recent complete short-stories of J�G�Ballard. So when
he writes, in the same review,
Paradigmatic sentence: "Let us, then, in the guise of a conclusion,
clarify the incompatibility between Lacan and Levinas through
reference to John Woo's film Face/Off (1997)." Well, if anything is
going to clarify for us the incompatibility between Lacan and Levinas,
it's going to be a run-through of the plot of Face/Off ; but as to
what Levinas thought, said, or did, or even which century he or she
lived in, the book is mysteriously silent, as if these were the kinds
of things we all ought to know about already. Well, I don't. (Brief,
unabusive illumination c/o this newspaper will be welcomed.)
or
[T]here is, true, rather a lot about "the Other" here, and we're not
talking about the term in its Carry On sense.
it demonstrates a genuine gulf between Anglophone and Continental
thought. (I haven't read Levinas or Lacan myself, of course, but I
do know who they were. Besides, I haven't seen Face/Off, either.)
By contrast, here's an
article
on Luc Ferry, a philosopher sufficiently cool that his
denunciation of the penseurs '68
was cited on th'
golublog, and whose current book is in the French best-sellers
list, is also the (beleaguered, to be sure) French education
minister. That article is more worth reading than some I've posted,
incidentally - Ferry took an unorthodox route to prominence, which is all
the more intrigiguing if, like me, you thought that never happened in
France. As a philosopher he has mostly been concerned to defend the
concept of the autonomous human subject as responsible agent, in
opposition to the often anti-humanist tendencies of structuralism and
its aftermath, which would be interesting to see. (Although not so
interesting that I'm not going to wait until his latest is out in
poche format.)
I bet he knows who Levinas was, too.
And, while we're on the hard stuff, here's a
DN article on the
dubious hilarities of the Christian Zionist movement in the US. You
can probably guess that they give me the heebie-jeebies, but since I'm
temporarily unable to compare their world-view to totalitarianism,
I'll have to try and say something intelligent instead.
The thing I find interesting about America is the way it bases its
self of its own identity primarily on mythologies of the future
- "the American dream", for instance, which still feels
mythopoetically real to me, at least. European national identities,
by contrast, are invariably rooted in a mythological sense of past
which basis itself cultural and (often especially) ethnic "roots".
That both systems are utter bollocks is beside the point, as is the
European smugness (and American insecurity) that often accompanies
their interaction. More interesting are the ways in which they can go
horribly wrong: Europe specialises in insane massacres on "ethnic" and
nationalist lines (based, in the smoking ruins of what was once
Yugoslavia, on a deranged mythologised "history" that extended back to
medieval grievances), whereas the American refusal of history has made
it vulnerable to precisely the kind of religious fundamentalism which
refuses to distinguish between the mythological past and the present.
The American system has the advantage of accommodating imigration, and
the corresponding ethnic diversity. (I might additionally claim that
where diversity not been successfully absorbed it's because a group
has a sense of its history in America which cannot simply be
jettisoned. But I might not.) The European system, on the other
hand, has a bunch of really cool old buildings.
Swings and roundabouts, is it not, Varied Reader? Swings and roundabouts.
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