*

TWITTER | @martingruner

    31.10.04

    Blogging. Everyone is doing it.

    Latest additions to the blogosphere (that I've noticed, anyway. They might not be that recent) :

    Noam Chomsky: the man who gives loony, paranoid lefties a good name. Also the man who invented the idea that you're born with the structure of language.

    Kristin Halvorsen: Probably the closest you get in Norway to a politician who thinks somewhat similarly to what I think and is actually in a position where she might get something done. I like her alot, and wouldn't be dismayed to see her as prime minister. I'd vote for her. Y'know. If I had a vote.

    Lesson of the day: don't use big words unless you're absolutely sure what they mean. Especially when said words are liberally sprinkled throughout a nineteen-page document that some poor sap in Norway (i.e. me) will be translating.

    Komma, komma, komma, komma og punktum.
    Semikolon-med-stor-S; komma, komma og komma; semikolon, komma og komma, punktum.

    Spørsmålstegn?

    28.10.04

    Enda en tanke fra oversettingsarbeidet

    Som min norsklærer på ungdomskolen pleide å si til meg: "hvorfor anvende fremmedord når det eksisterer adekvate substitutter?"

    Lappingen begyner at blive lidt vel vaklig

    Jeg har sittet foran en dataskjerm i hele dag og jobbet med en lengre oversetterjobb jeg er igang med, til en utstillingskatalog for en videokunstnerduo. Jeg begynner å bli ganske kokt i hodet nå. Oversetting er vanskelig ("det umuliges kunst") og jeg blir fort sliten av det, med mindre det er ekstremt interessante tekster.

    Jeg har tenkt mye på oversetting i det siste, og hvordan språket fungerer i forhold til andre språk, etc. Jeg vet ikke om jeg orker å bidra med mine tanker om akkurat det, siden det er et større og klokere hoder enn mitt som har gjort det (alle de store oversettere har gigantiske hoder. Påskeøyene hadde enormt mange oversettere i førhistorisk tid), men jeg blir ved med å tenke på ordet "gjendiktning." Det er egentlig omdikting man driver på med. Man skal prøve å få frem de samme meninger innenfor en annen språkpraksis. Utføre andre språklige manøvrer for å komme frem til omtrent det samme innhold.

    Men noen ganger er det helt umulig, og man må bare ta på seg forfatterhatten og skrive sin egen tale. Gode oversettere skriver mer om seg selv i tolkningen, sies det, enn forfatteren gjør. Ja, ja, den er god nok, men ikke helt sann. Man kan ihvertfall gjøre det når man oversetter dikt, men det er ganske vanskelig når man oversetter et tørt akademisk essay. Ellers: Prøv å oversette avantgardistisk lyrikk fra første halvdel av århundret en gang. Det lar seg ikke gjøre, stort sett. Man må skrive et helt nytt dikt. Sagt på en annen måte: det lar seg ikke gjøre, men noen ganger kan man gjøre det bedre.

    Det første eksempelet jeg husker, og muligens en av de beste oversettelsene jeg noensinne har vært borti, er Mogens Jermiin Nissens oversettelse av Lewis Carols Jabberwocky (et herlig stykke avantgardistisk lyrikk for barn). Han oversatte

    `Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
    Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
    All mimsy were the borogoves,
    And the mome raths outgrabe.

    med

    Et slidigt gravben vridrede
    i brumringen på tidvis plent,
    og lappingen var vaklig, og
    det borte grøfgrin grent.

    Det er tydelig at MJN hadde en mye større følelse for språket som lyd enn Lewis Caroll, som jo forøvrig visstnok også var pedofil, så det forklarer jo den saken.

    Ellers, så har den sosiale diskursen i hjemmet forandret seg drastisk siden igår. "Når vi finner oss et sted å bo" har blitt oversatt til "hvor skal vi stille bokhyllene?" Og "sender du meg melken?" til "skal vi ta et glass champagne til?" Jeg føler meg herlig domestisert på en helt og holden god måte. Men så har jeg jo også verdens beste kjæreste.

    27.10.04

    And there was much rejoicing

    We have a place!

    To live!

    Which is exactly the place we wanted to live!

    Horray!

    [Sound of champagne cork popping in background, confetti coming down in colorful showers, those annoying things you put in your mouth on New Years that make noise (no, not firecrackers, the other thing), fireworks, cheering multitudes, etc.]

    25.10.04

    En ode til norsk språkråd

    Jeg elsker Norsk språkråd.
    (Og n'en er stor, fordi det er et egennavn)

    Hvor ellers kan man finne ut den korrekte måten å skrive ikkeinnblandingspolitikk og sciencefictionroman?
    (Det skrives altså sånn - i et ord.)

    Man ønsker å henvise visse norske "aviser" til denne siden, i håp om at de vil begynne å skrive f.eks. puppesex, sexdrept, sexdømt etc. Jeg blir bare sur av alle disse forsøk på å få meg til å kjøpe avisen med forlokkende bindestreker. Tror de jeg er dum? Hvis jeg vil ha bindestreker kan jeg jo bare kjøpe andre blader som er fulle av dem.

    I en arbeidspause står jeg utenfor universitetet og snakker med en av mine mer venstreradikale venner som jeg ikke har sett på et halvt års tid. Jeg spør ham hva han driver på med.

    -Jeg går i skole.
    -Skole-skole? Spør jeg, og justerer ubevisst min stemme til et helt nøytralt toneleie for å liksom understreke at jeg på ingen måte er en elitist.
    -Sveise- og platearbeiderskole, sier han. Fagteknisk.
    -Åja, sier jeg, og plutselig innser jeg at jeg er en karakter i en Dag Solstad-roman.

    24.10.04

    Kilgore Trout RIP

    Oh, wow. Out-of-print science fiction writer Kilgore Trout is dead. I'm going to miss the old fuck.

    Ting-a-ling, you son of a bitch.

    (But wait... didn't he die at some writers retreat in New Hampshire back in 2001? After a clambake? I could have sworn I read his obituary already.)

    23.10.04

    "My four-year-old could have painted that"

    ...And in fact, she might have: Four year-old girl makes it big on the New York Art Scene.

    "Despite prompting from her father, a giggling Marla refused to speak about her work to BBC News Online. "

    Hmm.

    Lies, damned lies and statistics

    Out of the people voting for George W. Bush:

    – 75% believe Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda.
    – 74% believe Bush favors including labor and environmental standards in agreements on trade.
    – 72% believe Iraq had WMD or a program to develop them.
    – 72% believe Bush supports the treaty banning landmines.
    – 69% believe Bush supports the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
    – 61% believe if Bush knew there were no WMD he would not have gone to war.
    – 60% believe most experts believe Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda.
    – 58% believe the Duelfer report concluded that Iraq had either WMD or a major program to develop them.
    – 57% believe that the majority of people in the world would prefer to see Bush reelected.
    – 56% believe most experts think Iraq had WMD.
    – 55% believe the 9/11 report concluded Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda.
    – 51% believe Bush supports the Kyoto treaty.
    – 20% believe Iraq was directly involved in 9/11.

    Wait...does that mean that the stupid people who don't read papers are voting for Bush?

    (list nicked from Daily Kos. Link in sidebar.)

    Also, I've been meaning to post this: An article by Ron Suskind in the NY Times about Bush's faith-based presidency.

    In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the
    White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

    The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

    22.10.04

    In other news, I turned in my thesis application today, outlining the project I intend to write for my master thesis. If it gets approved, I'll be writing a thesis on the problem of genre. I'll try to post a summary tomorrow, but for now I'm too tired. I'm going to go to the cinema and allow myself for once to see something dumb. Or at least something that involves lots of guns and naked women.

    Rotating bodies twist the space-time continuum, scientists assert, thus proving Einstein correct --again.

    Meanwhile, my favourite body, rotating or not, is currently on a plane to North Dakota, thus twisting my body's space-time contiuum into strange new shapes. My heart suffers jet lag in Grand Forks, while the rest of my body endures the absence in a numb apartment in Bergen. Time shifts itself into new and unheard-of categories of agonizingly slow; subdivides itself into infitesimal fragments of experience, each one having to be known, drip by drip of the leaky faucet that keeps me awake, before she comes back.

    And they wonder why I oppose the military.

    21.10.04

    We report, you deride

    John Kerry.

    George Bush.

    20.10.04

    George W. on TV last night. Seen speaking at a rally for his father's presidential election at some time in 1988, he got up on the podium and admonished a large crowd to "kick something of Dukakis', and kick it hard!'" He's the young, reckless son, so he can get away with that. His style is still rough and unfinished. His unibrow is unplucked and his suit makes him look like a villain on Miami Vice. This is frat-boy George, whom I haven't seen before. The guy who doesn't know where he's going or what he's doing, but is certain of his privileged position in the world and always has been. He looks at one point towards the camera, and I catch the electrified, thousand-watt gaze which, when I see it in nightclubs, makes me think of cocaine or amphetamines. He's high on something, but it might just be the crowd. He might be getting a taste for the political life at this point.

    I never got the point that Bush was "likeable." He seems like a singularly unlikeable man to me. An overprivileged man who didn't care about people unless they could do something for him. A small-minded egoist who just happens to stumble into the most ego-gratifying position in the world.

    Later on, we see him managing the Texas Rangers. More relaxed and polished at this point. Networking, shaking hands. Signing things. Demonstratively hugging his father, the president of the United States, at a ball game. He's about to run for governor.

    And I catch myself thinking: this guy ought to have a successful small business in Austin selling cell phones. Or maybe he should be a mid-level manager in a small oil company. He shouldn't have gotten anywhere near political power. He shouldn't have even been able to look at the presidency of the United States and think "I can totally do that."

    I'm going to stop posting political rants soon. I promise.

    17.10.04

    Pedro, sønn av Jesus

    Hurra for min gode venn "både høy og -" Stein Lllanos* som har forlovet seg med sin kjæreste, Åsta Ytre! Det er nesten så man blir helt rørt. De blir voksne så fort. Snufs.

    Stein, degos-alibiet i min venneflokk**, jobber for tiden med å bryte ned kjønnsrollemønstrene i dataspill, så det var vel passende at det var Åsta som fridde til ham, i Tivoli. Gratulerer til det heldige par, og for å sitere Erlend Loe, den kjente norske kjønnsteoretiker: revolusjonær praksis, i full fart avsted over landeveien og sol hele dagen.

    * Som til tross for kallenavnet kun er Stein med stor S, og kun høy i den tradisjonelle geografiske forstand.
    ** Som også er en av de beste venner man kan ha.

    William Gibson is blogging again! I've been waiting for this news for a long time. Welcome back, Bill.

    One actually has to be something of a specialist, today, to even begin to grasp quite how fantastically, how baroquely and at once brutally fucked the situation of the United States has (...) been made to be.

    Blood

    It's been so long since I've seen my own blood in any significant quantity that I've pretty much forgotten what it feels like and looks like and tastes like. When I got a nosebleed just now (from banging my nose against a bathroom doorframe accidentally) the blood on the white tiles of the bathroom seemed like a movie prop. Like it was too real. Too much like real blood to be real blood. Absurd.

    And it seemed to come out in ridiculous quantities, too. I used up reams of paper getting it to dry, and it just kept pouring out, getting on everything, dripping into my mouth, through my beard, getting everywhere. It looked like I killed someone out there before I finished.

    In the middle of it all, I saw for the first time my no.1. candidate for best bathroom grafitti in the University so far:

    "If you're alone right now, why not just start singing?"

    So I did. I sang "I get a kick out of you." I'm glad noone came in and wondered who kicked me. Or even worse, heard the part that goes:

    some they may go for cocaine
    i’m sure that if, I took even one sniff
    it would bore me terrifically too
    but I get a kick out of you.

    Pentagon officials would not comment on the details of the allegations. Lt. Cmdr. Alvin Plexico issued a Defense Department statement in response to questions, saying that the military was providing a "safe, humane and professional detention operation at Guantánamo that is providing valuable information in the war on terrorism.''

    The statement said: "Guantánamo guards provide an environment that is stable, secure, safe and humane. And it is that environment that sets the conditions for interrogators to work successfully and to gain valuable information from detainees because they have built a relationship of trust, not fear.'

    Lt.Cmdr Plexico then broke into laughter, and continued "aw, who am I kidding? I couldn't even say that with a straight face! Of course we're doing all those things, but y'all can't do anything about them, because we're armed to the teeth and you're all a bunch of pussies caring about human rights and all."

    Noticeably livid with laughter, he stopped to try to control himself, and finally continued, amidst intermittent bouts of giggles: "Look, bottom line: we do what we want, to defend freedom and democracy, so that our children can sleep safely at night, so that we can all be free citizens with the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. You know, so that we all have access to freedom of the press, the right to a fair and speedy trial, all that stuff. Freedom of religion, the works."

    And then Plexico left the room, ending the meeting by saying "now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and strap one of these towelheads to a chair and play Limp Bizkit at max volume right into his ears until they bleed."
    (NY Times, Oct. 17th)



    Ok, so I made up the last three paragraphs.

    [Update: Teresa Nielsen Hayden has an excellent essay on "extraordinary rendition" (a euphemism for outsourcing torture to other states less bothered by such things as human rights) which considers the moral and practical sides of torture as it relates to civil rights. It's very, very good.]

    15.10.04

    9/11-commission

    Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is a surprise bestseller in the United States (despite being freely available online). It appears to be surprisingly readable and offers the fullest account of September 11th so far. It has now been nominated for the National Book Award's non-fiction prize. The first time a government report has been nominated for that prize since the Attica report.

    14.10.04

    Liv, verk, autonomi, bla bla, blablabla, blablablabla

    Imorges, innen jeg hadde stått opp av sengen, og i grunnen innen jeg hadde våknet, var det en mann på radioen som snakket om Hamsun. Han hevdet at det ikke var noen motsetninger mellom det å være en stor forfatter og en nazist. Jeg tenkte: "hvorfor sitter denne mannen på radioen og ytrer banaliteter og får betalt for det? Det kan jeg da også gjøre." Men det var tilsynelatende ikke så banalt allikevel, for det virket som om intervjueren stilte det ene kritiske spørsmålet etter det andre. Det tror jeg nå iallefall. Jeg var, som sagt, ikke helt våken. Eller for å si det rett ut: jeg sov, men våknet litt innimellom.

    Og så leser jeg på the Guardians webside at en ny Shakespeare-biografi handler om Shaxberdens linker til Jesuittiske motstandsgrupper ("terror-celler") i Lancashire. Var Shakespeares kjedelige, litt trauste historiske liv bare en front for en hemmelig agent? Hadde Shakespeare et nervøst sammenbrudd mellom Timon of Athens og Coriolanus? Var han en eksotisk, spennende figur?

    ...Eller var han bare en fabelaktigt dyktig forfatter som var en ganske kjedelig person? Er det virkelig en ide som er så vanskelig å svelge?

    Men nå sender Ragnfrid meg Jeg-Er-SULTEN-blikket, så jeg tror jeg avslutter dette her.

    The New York Times corrects the horribly botched obituary of Jacques Derrida (which I mentioned previously) in a new one (this one an intellectual biography).

    13.10.04

    Wow. Smoking gun? Republican Party paying for voter fraud? This could be big. If there's any truth to it, I hope it doesn't drown in the post-debate spin.

    Alikdote

    Apropos dikt med få ord, min venn Trygve-som-ikke-er-broren-til-Ragnfrid pleier å fortelle en historie om Muhammed Ali. Mange år etter boksekarrieren hans tok slutt, halvt oppspist av parkinsons sykdom, skulle han holde en tale for Harvards studenter . Når noen i folkemengden ropte til ham "give us a poem, Ali" svarte han med dette diktet (som skal forestilles lest av Ali selv for virkelig å fungere) :

    "Me -
    We!"

    ...Eller det var iallefall det jeg trodde han sa. Men når jeg søkte på nettet for å bekrefte historien, leste jeg noen andre som mente han sa

    "Me -
    Oui!"

    Du bestemmer: et brennende forsvar for egeninteressen i det kapitalistiske samfunns ånd, eller en inklusiv og åpen form som fremhever menneskets plass som borger i storsamfunnet?

    Høst

    I anledning høsten, og denne "nye" trenden med "visuell poesi:"


    blad

    blad

    blad


    blad
    blader
    blader blader
    blader blader blader
    blad blader blader blader blader
    blader blader blader blader blader
    blader blader blader blader blader blader
    blader blader blader blader blader blader blader
    blad

    Bvadr?

    (Egentlig skulle det være mye mer visuelt, men jeg kjemper mot html'en her.)

    Altså:

    Mer norsk, mindre engelsk.

    Og måske til og med lidt dansk?

    Not quite Norwegian, but pining for the fjords nonetheless

    I've been blogging for a little over a year and a half now. I started the blog in English, and maintained it in English for a number of reasons. Mostly, because at the time, I felt like I wanted to write English more than Norwegian, that I needed to maintain it and that it was the language I was the most skilled with in writing. Also, obviously because I wanted people to be able to read it. At the time there were hardly any Norwegian blogs that I knew of, and most of them were about teenage broadband-connected anxiety in the suburbs of Oslo. Writing English meant a bigger band of possible readers.

    After my little blogging identity-crisis and the following seven months of romantic bliss, I have been rethinking what I want to with this place alot. And one of the new things I want to do is practice writing Norwegian. I no longer feel that I am more skilled at writing in English than in Norwegian (though I do seem to have a better knack for structured argument in English than literary prose, and vice versa), but equally skilled. I also find that a significant portion of my "readership" (i.e. 9 out of the 10 of you) understand both languages, despite my intentions to reach the world through blogger superstardom. Therefore I find that I have to decide what language I should be writing in. My answer, for the moment, will be a very half-assed both. I'll see what works and what doesn't work, and we'll see if I need to change that.

    But I will be posting more in Norwegian than I have been doing (I believe, a total of two posts since I started). For those of you who don't understand Norwegian, I'm sorry you won't be able to understand some of my writings from this point on, or at least until the English-Norwegian Babelfish translator comes along. I don't expect this to raise pulses or cause tears worldwide, but I just thought I'd inform you. But don't worry. I still hope to be posting 50/50.

    WTC memorial

    My favourite Norwegian architects, Snøhetta (that's the name of the company), won the contract for the World Trade Center Museum Complex. I'm very excited about this. I only discovered Snøhetta fairly recently, after they built the new library in Alexandria. One of Norway's most prominent author's, Kjartan Fløgstad, wrote a book about them recently, which I have yet to get around to reading. It sounded very interesting at the reading, and it got me hooked on their ideas. The subtitle is "Snøhetta and the unmonumental monumentalism." This is precisely why Snøhetta should get this contract:

    Mr. Dykers of Snohetta [has] a conception of what his building - on the northeast corner of Fulton and Greenwich Streets - should look like: "Simple, very unassuming and perhaps unimposing. But we would also like it to be memorable and to provide an identity for that corner.

    "It should be a building that doesn't distract from the memorial," he said. "A building that is almost invisible."
    (NY Times, Oct.13th.)


    In other words, they won't build something large and imposing with the word Freedom or Justice in the name, but something respectful. They don't do pompous or loud. I'm hoping it will be something that doesn't canonize the dead or keeps building on the national myth accumulating around September 11th, of how it changed everything when it fact, it changed nothing.

    I recently experienced the power of one Snøhetta building, the first I have actually experienced in real life, when I visited my friends M and T who are living temporarily in Sandvika. Snøhettas cultural centre there is amazing: a large, sloping, oblong building, seemingly sliding gently into the city centre. Despite it's size and directed-ness, and the sense of it almost falling, it seemed very quiet and unimposing. Very naturally located inbetween an otherwise nondescript city centre. It reminded me of the effect one gets when very large men are quiet, graceful people. They seem almost doubly quiet for their appearance of brutality and gracelessness.

    The unique thing about the building in Sandvika is the way it exists along several axes at once. The building slopes along several planes, but somehow remains level inside. You walk into it, and everything seems normal until you have reached the front panoramic windows. Then, as you turn back, perspective disappears. Lines fall away into many vanishing points. The floor seems to slope and not slope at the same time. Often in the wrong direction from the building. It is as though several frames of relativity exist simultaneously, seemingly not allowing one sense of perspective to dominate. It is both a profoundly disturbing and exhilarating experience. I was for the longest time unable to figure out that the floor was actually level. Look at these two pictures. Can you tell?

    It's just an optical illusion, of course, but it seems, when you're there, like it's something more than that. I walked back to the train station, afterwards, and the hopelessly square buildings of the rest of Sandvika seemed to slope and lean. As though my perception of right angles had changed. Or maybe more as though the building itself warps the nature of the straight line around it. Calls it an abstraction and pretends to dispense with it, while instead creating several straight-line frames for people to move through and in. As such, the building seems at the same time to be a celebration of, and an assault on, euclidean space. It seems fitting for such a plurality to be the basis for a cultural center.

    If this is the power of a building to change the way we think about things, the way we structure our thoughts, I can think of no architect that I would rather have doing something as important as the WTC memorial. Maybe they will contribute to the more sober reckoning of September 11th which becomes more and more neccesary for every day that goes by.

    (Oh, and Frank Gehry, maker of the Bilbao Guggenheim and another of my favourite architects, won the Performing Arts Centre contract. I have hope for the site.)

    12.10.04

    Timberrr

    From the debate transcripts from the "town hall" -presidential debate last friday.
    KERRY: (...) Ladies and gentlemen, that's just not true what he said. The Wall Street Journal said 96 percent of small businesses are not affected at all by my plan.

    And you know why he gets that count? The president got $84 from a timber company that owns, and he's counted as a small business. Dick Cheney's counted as a small business. That's how they do things. That's just not right.

    BUSH: I own a timber company?

    (LAUGHTER)

    That's news to me.

    (LAUGHTER)

    Need some wood?

    (LAUGHTER)

    I am sceptical of a president who does not know when he has wood.

    [snare drum]

    11.10.04

    I just saw a one-armed man rolling a cigarette.

    So... it's going to be that kind of week, eh?

    A whole bunch of Derrida excerpts. As if I didn't have enough to read.

    As far as I remember, "Letter to a Japanese Friend" is a good introduction to deconstruction.

    Jacques Derrida 1930-2004

    Jacques Derrida, probably one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, died on friday from pancreatic cancer, age 74. He leaves behind a family and an immensely interesting body of work which I have only just begun to look at.

    Derrida invented the method (which he always insisted wasn't a method) of deconstructivism, thus coining one of the most misused phrases in academics and elsewhere. I even heard the phrase used the other day in a movie supposedly set in the 16th century .

    I'm not going to get into a discussion of deconstruction, because I don't know enough about it, other than to say I think it's one of the most fruitful and constructive ways of thinking I know of, and just the ticket for these times, where words and ideas seem to have more power than ever. I can't really think of a school of though which I would rather have gain support in the world today.

    He was simultaneously one of the most cherished and despised philosophers, as his obituaries seem to demonstrate: one, in the Guardian was measured and praising; the other, in the NY Times was abrasive and, in my opinion, silly under a pretense of being fair. At the end, it seems to fault Derrida for saying we don't know that we don't know what we are talking about when we talk about September 11th. And while I know that we don't know etc, most people seem not to. Anybody thinking Derrida wrong can just have a look at the heady, not quite laser-guided precision of electoral rhetoric in the US of A. A huge, glaring bulls-eye for deconstruction if ever I saw one. It practically deconstructs itself. All it needs is a little push.

    I just started reading Derrida's "Memoirs - for Paul De Man" a couple of days ago, and now his words, a eulogy for a dead friend, seem to take on a double meaning, a double sadness.

    9.10.04

    "To his coy mistress" by Andrew Marvell: An analysis

    "Had we but world enough, and time" begins this wonderful piece of beseeching love poetry from the 17th century. The implications for a reading of the poem is dramatic: the poem concerns itself not only with an adress of amorous intent, but with more fundamental questions of the poet's in-der-welt-sein, which will be the central subject matter of this reading.

    The text alerts us to this intent of existential exploration by immediately invoking space and time in its opening lines, thus signaling the fundamental problem of man's already-being-in-the-world and already-being-in-time. Behind the words of love, it says, lies always death, the null point of creation and destruction that makes the human experience always-liminal. Thus, seemingly foreshadowing Sigmund Freud's Eros-Thanatos division of the human psyche three centuries ahead of its time, Marvell seeks to compress the division of desire and time imposed on the fragmented, naked experience of being into a manageable now-ness of constant awareness. A perpetual orgasm, literally faced with the spectacle of death. Meaning is created through presence in the now and

    He's trying to say "let's get it on, already!"

    Child of largely abstract cultural icon lives, works in Havana, Cuba

    Being the daughter of Che Guevara for only 6 years before his death must be like being the offspring of an Andy Warhol painting or James Dean. Anyway, this article in the NY times is interesting, if nothing else then for the image it brings to mind: of the child of a socialist hero (I use the term in a cultural, not a personal sense) being forced to see her father's face on the t-shirts of mindlessly assimilated idiots everywhere, knowing they have no idea what he stands for.

    We are happy as a family when my father's image inspires people to learn more about him and his thinking, but often the commercialization seems to us like a lack of respect for who he was and what he stood for.

    True, but, that having been said, let's not forget about the firing squads, either.

    Fun fact: my father was a part of the team who first translated and published the writings of Che, Fidel et al into Danish.

    7.10.04

    "Samuel Beckett once said: 'Every word is like an unnecessary stain on
    silence and nothingness.' "

    ...

    ...

    "On the other hand, he said it."



    -Art Spiegelman, Maus-

    6.10.04

    No relation at all to the previous post

    Pathetic? Sexually frustrated? Closet homosexual? Then this website is just the thing for you: Imaginary Girlfriends.

    * Tired of your friends and family telling you to get a girlfriend?
    * Want to make that certain someone a little jealous? Need a confidence boost?
    * Just feeling lonely sometimes?

    With an Imaginary Girlfriend, you can carry on a completely fictitious, yet authentic looking relationship with the girl of your choice. Browse through our site and choose your favorite girl to see what she can offer as your Imaginary Girlfriend.

    (My italics. As if they were neccessary.)

    My girlfriend can totally beat up your girlfriend

    World, meet my girlfriend.

    Her name is Ragnfrid and her new blog is over here. She claims that she'll be writing in both English and Norwegian.

    In case you haven't been stalking me for the past seven months, my girlfriend is an acclaimed Norwegian novelist, and if it sounds like I'm bragging...well, I am. She's published two novels in Norwegian, and a radio play for young people. Her third novel (a collective novel, written with two others) is coming out this fall.

    Also, I've decided to start blogging again now.