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,
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)

Twinkletree Travel

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)

Kunglighet Koverage

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)

Maigret and the disappearing translations

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)

Sm�rg�spost

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)

Oceanographic Observations

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)

A man must break his back to earn his day of leisure

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.

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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)

Sn�kaos i Bristol!

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)

My laptop's called Thor

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)

Tampere is 1,200 miles from Hertfordshire

(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)

What's it all about, then, Bertie?

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.

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2002-12-09 21:14

Nobel Noshing

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?

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2002-12-09 17:34 (UTC)

Butterflapping Hurricanation, Hurrah!

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.)

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2002-12-09 16:31

Woke up this morning, Lord, had me the Diaryland blues. (Deux fois)

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.

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2002-12-09 11:59

You're history / no good for me / nya nya na-uh.

[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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