2002-11-15 13:16 (UTC)

Resistance is useless.

Everyone seems to be blogging this Derrida interview [via Erik] and even if Derrida isn't a major boat-floater ch�z Desbladet it was still worth the read. Wash it down with this nice Danish encyclopedia article on Bourdieu and you shouldn't come to any lasting harm.

[Permalink]

2002-11-15 09:55 (UTC)

Hysterical Raisons

Early in the last millenium Swein, son of Harold Bluetooth and usurper of his empire (Denmark and Norway in today's money), had taken to harrying England and demanding tribute payment (the famous Danegeld) from King �thelred, who became (as Ethelered the Unready)a byword for haplessness in a millenium's worth of school history books.

The strain on the government was demonstrated when, in 1002, �thelred and his council ordered a massacre of all Danes living in England. This extraordinary command cannot have been fully enforced - in some areas the population was largely Danish - but it hints at something approaching hysteria.
John Blair, The Anglo-Saxon Age: A very short introduction

Cut to a thousand years later, outside the British Embassy in Shoppingharbour. A mob (well, three people) is gathered to angrily protest this outrage and demand an official apology (while trying not to giggle). Embassy staff come out to see what's going on. A confrontation is inevitable:

Nu kommer et par ansatte fra ambassaden ud for at se, hvad der foreg�r. De l�ser skiltene og begynder at grine.
�Var der ikke noget med, at danskerne kom og h�rgede England utallige gange i den tid?� sp�rger en kvinde fra ambassaden, da latteren har lagt sig.
�Den del af historien har vi valgt at se bort fra i dag,� siger Frederik Petersen med et smil p� l�ben.
[...]
�Kommer I s� ogs� med skilte, hvor der st�r Alle vikinger er nogle prutter p� tusind�rsdagen for Danmarks erobring af England?� sp�rger hun.

�Nej, det m� nogle engl�ndere g�re. Men s� vil vi muligvis lave en moddemonstration,� siger Frederik Petersen bestemt. De ansatte g�r grinende tilbage til ambassaden.

Yeah, well, all Vikings are fartypants, so there!

[Link via Birgitte, tack]

[Permalink]

2002-11-14 12:16 (UTC)

You shan't come to the ball!

S�dan er etiketten, you see; Knu�ella can't come to the Official Hunt Dinner, other than as the Official Blivande Kronprinsess by marriage, which she is not on account of not being engaged to his Kronprinshet, Fred (the one in the silly hat traditional hunting outfit).

Which is to say:

�Prinsens k�reste vil ikke deltage i noget officielt f�r hun og Frederik bliver forlovet. Derefter vil hun fremtr�de ved alle arrangementer,� siger man ved hoffet.

I think it's a wise precaution, personally; that's very much the sort of hat one would want to have a formal commitment prior to inflicting on one's sweetheart.

[Permalink]

2002-11-14 10:02 (UTC)

Pot! Spot!

There's nothing like an explanation of aspiration to bulk up that word count, you know. I was going to recycle the above below for the novel, but I got distracted by an urgent desire to explore the dialectic of empirical and idealist approaches to phonology. And although I'm still a long way behind, I'm also only a fraction of the way through what I have to say about that.

Meanwhile, Aftonbladet interviews M�rtha Louise (i ett sn�kallt och bl�sigt Oslo), who's shaping up to be Norway's very own Prince Edward, if you ask me:

M�rtha Louise �r ingen traditionell prinsessa, hon ger snarare intrycket av en modern aff�rskvinna, med eget f�retag.

She's got a Christmas CD coming out, you know. "Redan som barn sj�ng jag i k�r", she says. Well, so did I as it happens; perhaps I too should put out a CD of Norwegian Christmas songs.

[Permalink]

2002-11-13 16:53

[Book Review] Le Totemisme aujourd'hui

So, while procrastinating from my novel (oh dear) I read a whole book by L�vi-Strauss. What follows is likely to be affected by the facts that I don't know French all that well, but I don't like to use a dictionary if I can guess, especially when I've had a drink, which I had for most of the reading; and I don't have any background in the social sciences in general, never mind anthropology in particular.

The quote that exemplifies what I like about L�vi-Strauss's approach is the following, from Structural Anthropology:

Structural linguistics will certainly play the same kind of renovating role with respect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example, has played for the physical sciences.

"Structural linguistics" here means mostly phonology, which was the first and most important success for the approach, and the model for structuralism generally, with L�vi-Strauss being the most important figure in "structuralism generally". Don't confuse this with the vaguer sense in which Lacan and Foucault were said to be structuralists - L�vi-Strauss considered his peers to be linguists such as Jacobson, and his conception of structure is pure Saussure via Jacobson. One of the best, and certainly the funniest, sentence in the book makes this clear:

Si l'on permet l'�xpression, ce ne sont pas les resemblances, mais les differences, qui se ressemble.

At this point the internal structural relationships within, on the one hand, social groups and, on the other, their corresponding animals are being shown to be parallel. This, of course, is the point of the book and in line with what I expected (and wanted). More surprising was that this comes after a hundred or so pages of discussion of the failings of previous attempts to explain the purpose of animals in "primitive" thought and shortly before a discussion of Bergson's and Rousseau's anticipations of the key idea.

You get a lot of history of ideas with your structural anthropology, here; a lot more than I expected. Anyway "totemism" is comprehensively abolished in favour of an understanding of the metaphorical use of animal motifs to structure and understanding of society - they're not so much good to eat as good to think with, as the quote (I don't have it to hand) goes.

So, it's all top quality entertainment, but the fun doesn't stop there, not by a long chalk. The structuralist conception of phonology (based, since Jacobson, on binary oppositions) subsequently gave way to Chomsky and Halle's generative approach (not at all the same thing as generative grammar) which dominated phonological thinking for decades, even among those who disagreed with the approach.

So where does that leave the anthropology based on structural phonology, you might ask. And at this point you become entitled to my opinion: I think structuralism is going to make a come-back, in the form of a computational neo-structuralism (as it were) whose outlines I take to be dimly visible. (There's a lot to be said about the conception of the computer in L-S's thought, but that's for another day.)

And why I care about all this is that it seems to me that language is still the most promising laboratory available for the construction of a rigourous concept of the human sciences.

[Your regularly scheduled drivel will resume shortly, sn�kaos permitting.]

[Permalink]

2002-11-13 13:58

We'll always have Paris...

I've been meaning to get myself over to Paris - the Troms� of the South and a place I've never actually been - ever since I started doing French again, regardless of Vickans sojourn i k�rlekens huvudstad. Honest.

However, I'm spoken for for the next 6 weeks, so I'll have to save this handy Expressen guide to the city, which is not at all tacky and includes useful hints on hur tr�ffar man svenskar, for another occasion.

Shameless romantic that I am, I'll probably spend all my time (and money) in bookshops there - French books are cheap enough to make a stronger man than me bend his vows of book-buying abstinence.

[Permalink]

2002-11-13 09:43 (UTC)

Toontastic

My Norwegish newspaper of preference, VG, has Dilbert, dubbed and also running somewhat behind the official strip, which I read in Morgunbla�i�, with Icelandic subtitles, hurrah.

That they're out of synch merely doubles my daily Dilberting delights, of course. (Anyone seen svenska or danska versions? It would be great to have a full set!)

[Permalink]

2002-11-13 09:31 (UTC+1)

There's no kaos like sn�kaos...

There's sn�kaos in Oslo (good pictures on that one, BTW), there's sn�kaos in sodra Sverige.

If there's any sn�gaos[1] in Shoppingharbour then poshtastic Politiken is keeping it to themselves, which I don't think is very fair.

[1] Yes, I know. Simple pleasures, and all that.

[Permalink]

2002-11-12 15:31 (UTC)

Yes, we have no totemism today

I actually bought le Point this week because I was out just now for a stomp to work of some stress while the computers were being attended to, having gone down, and because L'�xpress had more about Jonny Halliday than I wanted to know. (Some forms of ignorance are to be cherished, n'est-ce pas?)

But then on page 107, there's this article on Claude L�vi-Strauss. Apparently a new edition of le Totemisme aujourd'hui is in preparation (amazon.fr is currently denying the book even exists, although I bought my copy from them a few months ago) and so on and so forth.

The article is by Catherine Cl�ment, author of the Que sais-je on the great man which the very same amazon.fr emailed me this morning to say they'd posted.

[Permalink]

2002-11-12 11:48

Republican reportage

I've never been fond of la-di-dah DN, of course, but I didn't have anything concrete on them until now. They're showing their true colours now though, being all sniffy about the lovely Vickan's heartbaring book:

Bokprojektet �r uppendbart en marknadsf�rings�tg�rd.

It gets worse though:

Det handlar faktiskt om att s�ljer in en id� till svenska folket - att det ska l�ta sig f�retr�das av en person ur en och samma familj, en person vars enda kvalifikation f�r uppgiften �r just att vara f�dd till den.

Shocking! If I had a subscription I'd cancel it, you may be sure of that. I stopped reading there, partly because of the sentiment and partly (mostly, to be honest) because la-di-dah DN uses hard words that make my brain hurt.

(Of course, if you translated that to English and said it about the British Royal Family, I'd probably join in on the chorus, but nevermind nevermind.)

[Permalink]

2002-11-12 11:06

The Private Prince

[ All links in this post are via Diana. ]

Carl Philip is clearly trying to keep his love life private, and who can blame him? Even the Aftonbladet article which caught him and Emma at the hockey concedes that "Bortsett fr�n smygtagna bilder fr�n Rivieran brukar de inte visa sig �ppet tillsammans." Point de Vue occasionally has a smygtagen bild or two in the Royal Round-Up section, but nothing more. She does look like his mum, though.

Meanwhile, the gossip page is arguably no less disturbing for being so sparse. (The Swedish version has links to the original newspaper articles.)

All of the Scandiwegian Royalties are marrying Ordinary Persons this generation - the European Exogamy Exchange is kompletely kaput. I have a suspicion

• that the timing coincides with the widespread fixing of the Primogeniture Gender Bug, corresponding to the acknowledgement that wimmins can be considered persons, and Monarchs, in their own right.
• that this is not a coincidence.

But I haven't really researched this properly at all. (Besides I'm reading L�vi-Strauss's Totemism rather than his kinship-and-exogamy study, so I don't even have a framework yet.)

As always, input from my Varied Reader is more than welcome.

[Permalink]

2002-11-12 09:47 (UTC)

Vocational Vacancies

There's a chronic shortage of persons in Sweden who can do useful things like plumbing, and cooking. With which I can't help, obviously - I am not even slightly useful.

[Permalink]

2002-11-11 19:36

Svenska grammatikb�cker

There's an (not very) old thread from se.humaniora.svenska which recommends Stroh-Wollin Koncentrerad nusvensk forml�ra och syntax (70 pages!) and Ljung/Ohlander Allm�n grammatik for ambitious learners of Swedish, which I assume includes Birgitte as well as me.

Both commonly used in h�gskolans grundkurser, whatever they are. (High school ground courses, yes. But what are they?)

[Permalink]

2002-11-11 13:07

Unspeakable silliness.

In order better to be able to follow the twists and turns of the Knu�ellabryllupsaga I have acquired a Berlitz Engelsk-Dansk Ordbog. (There don't appear to be more sensible dictionaries that are conveniently portable, so don't start, OK? I need to have Svenska, Norska and Franska dictionaries about me at all times, also, so you can imagine.)

It starts out promisingly in the Danish side:

I denne del af ordbogen har vi efter hvert opslagord angivet udtalen i international lydskrift (IPA).

But the English part, by contrast, uses some random made up piece-of-junk transcription that "should be read as if it were English", presumably specifically to annoy me.

In spoken Danish there is a phenomenon called the "st�d", which is a glottal stop [...] We don't show the "st�d" in our transcriptions, as it is not essential to understanding and being understood.

Instead, cheer yourself up with a review of the presumably now released Vickan book. Apparently her dyslexia lead to her spending all her "free" time on school work as a child, and she admits to being a control freak. It's clearly going to be a gripping read, even without any details on Relationships (which there aren't).

[Permalink]