Jon-Fosseland.

Lærdal er en nasjonalromantisk drøm. En kulisse til et Ibsen-stykke. Gamlebyen er latterlig vakker, fjellene overveldende bratte. Det virker lettere å finne roen der.

Til venstre den lokale kafeen; til høyre, antikviteter, bruktbutikken til Hallvard og Jon. I midten, lokalbefolkning og besøkende.

No to Gonzales

President Bush's new choice for attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, is partially responsible for the policy of "legitimized" and sanctioned torture which the United States is currently pursuing in Guantanamo and other detention facilities around the world. Abu Ghraib, among others. Daily Kos has started a petition to stop his confirmation. If you blog, especially if you live in the US, you should participate.

Don't buy the "bad apples" theory. This is policy, and Gonzales is behind it.

Finn in Banda Aceh

Tsunami Relief Action is the blog of a friend of mine, Finn Røsland, who I just learned has packed his things and gone to Banda Aceh to help with the relief effort.

He's clearing bodies. I hope he takes care of himself, and I'll be thinking of him.

Jetset lifestyle

Me and Ragnfrid are off to Lærdal for the weekend to visit her oldest brother and his husband. May or may not post.

Og foriøvrig gratulerer til Gunnhild Øyehaug, som fikk prisen for beste bok for novellesamlingen Knutar.

Jeg var med i nominasjonskomiteen, og er glad for at hun var vinneren, men jeg vil også understreke at alle tre kandidater var fantastisk bra, og at det egentlig er en like stor pris å bli nominert som å få prisen.

Vinner av Bergensprisen for beste øyeblikk under utdelingen av Bergensprisen

(PORNO-ROCCO går opp på scenen. Han ser skremmende normal ut, men er nok ganske opp-psyket på det å stå foran 500 mennesker. Finner ut at han må få publikum på sin side.)

PORNO-ROCCO:
(roper)
ER DET NOE LIV?!

PUBLIKUM:
(ignorerer ham fullstendig. Spredt, flau latter.)

PORNO-ROCCO:

Æh. Øh. Kandidatene. Øh.

KIS FRA SPETAKKEL:
(Hopper inn i et desperat forsøk på å redde øyeblikket)
Yo-yo, wazzup, BERGEN? Bla bla yo yo bla. Kandidatene, yo.

(Yo Yo Bla er forresten en litt obskur asiatisk cellist. Broren til Ma.)

Og mens vi nu er igang

Ø

Øen i søen har kun en barber.
Til gengæld så klipper han alt hvad han ser.
Han klipper sin fætter, sin hund og sit får.
Han klipper billetter når færgerne går.
Han klipper sin plæne, sin hæk, og sit hegn,
men selv er han skaldet som Roskildevej'n.

Halfdan Rasmussen: Halfdans ABC

Et lille uddrag fra den danske folkediktning som jeg fandt i en bog i morges. Her gengivet til glæde for almuen:

NOGET OM TAB OG GEVINST

Min skrivemaskine har mistet
en skråstreg i Ø
Den skriver bestandig en so,
når jeg mener en sø.
Og skriver jeg, bonden har bøfler,
da står der, har bofler.
Så nu har jeg endelig fundet
et rim på kartofler.

-Halfdan Rasmussen-

Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies deck just comes in handy all the time.

Speaking of which, I'm waiting with bated breath for the next two installments of the BBC4 program called "Chain Reaction," which will feature first Stuart Lee interviewing Alan Moore, then the next show will feature Moore interviewing Brian Eno, and then the next one will feature Brian Eno interviewing someone else. I'm looking forward to sitting in on those three conversations.

Factitiousness.

Ok, so it means pretty much the opposite of what I wanted it to mean.

(props to Gaute Z!)

An interview with Douglas Coupland at Nerve.com.

Why don't you blog?
Back in '91 or '92, I kept a diary, but I realized I was doing my life in this modular, paragraph-y way, thinking "Is this a diary entry or not?" I'd end up deleting all these big chunks of life when their only crime was that they weren't bloggable. Also, I type with two fingers — I took metalwork instead of typing.

So what's bloggable, then?
When you bump into someone from high school and they weigh two hundred pounds. The whole thing about Liz is that she lives a very quiet, interior life. A lot of the changes in life are not car crashes or insane situations — you can be at a stoplight one day and realize something that happened fifteen years ago went to your taproot and you're a different person. Nothing happened, but everything happened. So in this strange way, you're always going forward. I really wanted this book to have a stillness — not that it's an anti-blog or anything, blogs are great — but I don't think it's conducive to fiction.

To which I say "nuts," but I think it's interesting that the authors most branded as chronicling life right now, the storytellers of our generation, the bards of a songless generation blah blah blah now actually have to defend not having a blog.

(I do like a lot of Douglas Coupland's writing, though)

An interesting piece of musical synchronicity:

I just glanced at my iPod, and it told me that the song I was listening to was "Weather Storm" by Massive Attack. I knew the song well, have listened to it often. Never knew its name before.

Interesting.

The first time I heard this piece was last January around this time. I had just gotten the CD, and was listening to it while walking from the apartment where I was staying at the time to somewhere else (I forget where). It was about a month before I met Ragnfrid, and I walked through the city feeling maudlin for existential reasons. There was a blizzard that night. Huge, wet snowflakes driven by a mean wind, blinding me, plastering my hair to my forehead. The song seemed to express and augment the impression of the weather, my own emotional state.

So whenever I think of this piece of music, or hear it, it conjures up the image of this one particular street, under these particular trees, the flurries of heavy snow through headlights, this particular part of my emotional landscape attuned to these notes of the piano, this mechanical beat, this particular landscape that I also criss-crossed aimlessly on the night I met her.

And it's called "Weather Storm." How perfect. I must, the first time I heard that song, have been the perfect listener. The implied listener for that particular work.

Middle of everywhere

(Rambling post about the UWC experience)

If I had to sum up the experience of being at Red Cross Nordic United World College, it is with the following image: hearing a young girl from Sierra Leone discussing a Norwegian novel with its author, speaking in standardized New Norwegian with a hint of Sognefjord dialect, standing in front of a window opening up into a ridiculously beautiful snowy landscape that reveals only scattered signs of life: a road here, some streetlights, a cluster of houses in the distance); with the background noise being made up of equal parts conversation in Spanish, English and Norwegian, and Bjørn Eidsvåg.

I love meeting places. I feel that they are one of the most positive expressions of life in modernity. The internet is one of those places, the world is increasingly becoming such a place. I believe that United World College is one of those places as well.

I am not without reservations and apprehensions about the project, or its manifestations, but the idea of having 200 people from all over the world, and more or less all layers of society, living together in the middle of nowhere for two years, interacting, becoming friends, learning, is a very, very good idea. It does not work entirely as it should, but it works somewhat like it should, and that, since the idea is such a spectacularly good one, is enough of a justification for its existence.

My impression was that of an open, inclusive community. Bright, interested, conscious kids (my god - I'm calling them kids now, how long ago was this, anyway?*), asking good questions.

Weirdest part of the trip:

(Pre-emptive reservation: I think teaching is a very strong word, which should be reserved for teachers, but I did in some sense take part of the lesson on the side of the teachers desk I wasn't used to being at. But when I in the following use the word "teaching, I mean that in the loosest sense of the word. It was more like participating in a discussion with a slightly more authoritative voice than normal).

At some point, Norsklærer Arne suggested that I join him and R in his TOK (it's an IB subject. Stands for Theory Of Knowledge. Sort of like ex.phil) class.

So... um... I. Uh. Taught. Um. TOK. Heh. There's a sentence I never thought I'd write.

It was not unlike my old TOK classes. I found myself saying things like: "but if the bookshelf is being used as a coffee table, is it still a bookshelf?" Or: "But if you're sitting on the table, does it become a chair?" Thank God I didn't get into the whole do-vending-machines-have-language issue.

Later on, I participated in a Norwegian class, we discussed fact vs. fiction. Discussing Olaug Nilssen as related to Bertold Brecht's strategies for breaking suspension of disbelief, the factitiousness **/fictitiousness of "The Bookseller of Kabul," narrative desire vs. narrative resistance, etc. etc.

The students were, in both cases, smart, opinionated and well-argued. It must be a great job to teach them.

I was also glad to see that me and Ragnfrid are a good team when it comes to teaching/discussing. We know each other so well, that we know when to interrupt each other, and when to make comments. When to agree and when to shut up. (Well, she knows when to shut up, anyway).

It was a tremendous amount of fun, and I'm grateful I got to go on the trip. I even managed to get some work done, and to sleep in Queen Sonjas bed.

* When I think about it, it was one quarter of my life ago.

(Which is a very scary thought, indeed.)

(And a very comforting one, as well.)

** Factitiousness. Mmm. Good word. Does it actually exist?

Process

When I suggested recently to someone I know that I might publish the idea for my masters thesis online before I submit it, the response was "but someone might steal it!" Which, I suppose, is true. But that way of thinking goes against the way academia is supposed to work.

I just found a paper on blogging (it's PDF), by Jill Walker and Torill Mortensen, which talks (amongst many other things) about precisely this problem, accentuating the processual in academics through the process of maintaining a weblog. Also many other interesting thoughts on the topic (it's a sort of primer on weblogs), which I'm certain will be of a lot of use for me.

I'm definitely going to be doing this. The thesis idea goes online in a few days, when I get back from Fjaler...

Which, by the way, is the strangest place I've been in a while. More on this later.

Me and Ragnfrid are off to Red Cross Nordic United World College in Fjaler until thursday. She is holding lectures there, I'm going to be going underground working on my master's project.

They have internet there, obviously, so I might post. But I might not. Just a fair warning.

"I trust Steffi Graf speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job."
July 9, 2004

George W. Bush Quotations in Which the Words "God" or "The Almighty" or "The Almighty God" Are Replaced by Famous Names Chosen at Random From the '80s Edition of Trivial Pursuit.

(McSweeneys)

Hvis du tilfeldigvis er i Oslo, så syntes jeg du burde gå på minnekonserten til Sigurd Køhn imorgen. Køhn var en jazz-saksofonist som forsvant etter tsunamien i Asia. Jeg snakket faktisk med ham for to år siden, da han var i Bergen for å spille med Køhn/Johansen. Det var vel rett før, eller rett etter jeg anmeldte platen deres i BT (og ble faktisk sitert på websiden deres (slå opp på "presse")).

Jeg ble veldig glad av å høre på platen, og jeg ble enda gladere av å gå på konsert med dem. Det er trist av å høre at han er forsvunnet.

Interesting that an award-winning blog post is simply a collation of sources, hyperlinked and referenced, clearly demonstrating massively incompetent leadership in the American government. Simple, easy to read, with an amazing degree of political punch.

With the increasing transparency of society comes the ability for those willing to spend the time and effort to hold the other side to their word. Instant publishing of collatable, provable, checkable data is the political tool of the 21st century. This is a good thing. Truth may just become a democratic institution in the end. What it takes, however, is time and effort, and this is something people are becoming increasingly less willing to spend. Hooray for factcheckers!

Actually, I might just write a master's degree about this.

T.E. Hulme

Igår, under lystig lag med Audun L og Øystein V, informerte Pål N, det vandrende essayet, meg om en forløper for Ez Pound og imagistene ved navn T.E. Hulme. Han hadde jeg selvsagt aldri hørt om, så idag tidlig sto jeg straks, duggfrisk og rødøyd, opp fra sengen og googlet ham. Resultatet ble to dikt (visstnok fra en total produksjon på under ti verk), her copypasted-for-your-reading-pleasure:

Autumn

A touch of cold in the Autumn night --

I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

* * *

The Embankment

(The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night.)
Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,

In the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth's the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

-Thomas Ernest Hulme, 1909-

dr.dk/kultur

Danmark skal lage en kulturell kanon. (Danmarks Radio, gammelt nytt)

- Man regner med, at hvis vi tvinger andengenerationsindvandrere til at læse Oehlenschläger eller se et Arne Jacobsen-møbel, så vil de have en større forståelse for, hvordan vi tænker og gør. Man prøver at transformere den almindelige danskers nationale stolthed til indvandrerne, siger Lars-Henrik Schmidt, der ikke bryder sig om kanoner, fordi de betyder, at en hel masse ting vælges fra.

Til tross for at mannen har et poeng, så syntes jeg at denne artikkelen avslører en ekstremt ubehagelig polarisering som holder på å skje med diskursen i Danmark: det tenkes i vi og de, oss og dem. Selvsagt vil Oehlenschläger eller Arne Jacobsen ikke hjelpe dem å forstå hvordan vi tenker og gjør, fordi vi tenker og gjør slik som de tenker og gjør, fordi vi er dem, og de er oss. Dette er andregenerasjonsinnvandrere. De er danskere minst like mye, sannsynligvis mer, enn jeg er. Og det verste er at det er så sinnsykt sleipt. Alle gjør det, til og med de "kritiske" venstreintellektuelle. Det har sneket seg inn i diskursen, og nå finnes det færre og færre som sitter på utsiden av den.

Hirdehost (s): Den hosten som utvikler seg når hirden har røykt for mye av hirdherrens fleinsopp.

Dagføn (s): Føning når det foretas til ettermiddagsbruk.

Malebokråd (s): Det rådet som ivaretar malebøkenes interesser.

Finduke (v): Når man duker til fint selskap.

Stamerstall (s): Den stallen der man oppbevarer sine sta merrer.

Fælvorte (s): En skikkelig fæl vorte.

Germaine Greer.

On. Celebrity. Big. Brother.

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

And now, think about the fact that these people have nuclear weapons.

Jeg sølte nettopp et ganske bestemt glass vann (Mack-øl glass, 0,33l, satt 2/3 full ved siden av sengen for å avverge fyllesyke) over en kopi av Svein Jarvolls Et hvilket som helst glass vann. Nå kommer jeg ikke til å gidde å lese den engang. All ironien ble straks borte.

Book 1: The Sign of Four - Sherlock Holmes, Adorno, and the enlightenment as coke fiend

I've noticed that the blog meme du jour is the 50-book-challenge. It goes like this: one attempts to read 50 books this year, and one should try to blog about each book, if only to say that one has read it. I don't know if this is something I'll be doing regularly, but I might as well talk about what's on my mind and in my hands. I don't read as much as I should/used to, so maybe this will help me keep up.

The last book I read was The Sign of Four. It's the second Sherlock Holmes novel, before the series of "Adventures." We'll call it book 1 for this year. I've read passages in several other books, but haven't finished one.

Some personal background: Sherlock Holmes was actually the first thing I managed to read for myself in English. I don't really remember how it happened, but if you believe my parents, I taught myself English by comparing "the Hound of the Baskervilles" to the subtitles of the movie version. I don't really buy that, but I think that it helped me unlock some things. My point is just that it's an interesting experience going back over these books so many years later, because it raises the issue of why I'm still attracted to it.

It's not something I feel entirely comfortable admitting, but strap me to a chair and beat me, and I might let it slip that I still feel a strangely compelling attraction to the Sherlock Holmes universe. Reading one of these pieces still feels like sitting in a comfortable chair, or like lounging about the house in a bathrobe at four in the afternoon. I.e. like something comfortable, which I know isn't really helping me accomplish much of anything. And I don't think that it does. It might have, at some point, but not anymore. For all of its merit, I don't think that Sherlock Holmes can be called great art or great litterature by any stretch of the imagination. So why do people read it and like it?

Perhaps it's the snappy, gripping, well-paced dialogue?

“My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, [90] give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”

“The only unofficial detective?” I said, raising my eyebrows.

“The only unofficial consulting detective,” he answered. “I am the last and highest court of appeal in detection. When Gregson, or Lestrade, or Athelney Jones are out of their depths–which, by the way, is their normal state–the matter is laid before me. I examine the data, as an expert, and pronounce a specialist’s opinion. I claim no credit in such cases. My name figures in no newspaper. The work itself, the pleasure of finding a field for my peculiar powers, is my highest reward. But you have yourself had some experience of my methods of work in the Jefferson Hope case.”

“Yes, indeed,” said I cordially. “I was never so struck by anything in my life. I even embodied it in a small brochure, with the somewhat fantastic title of ‘A Study in Scarlet.’”
He shook his head sadly.

“I glanced over it,” said he. “Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.”

(That grinding sound you hear in the background is that of the slow and unoiled gears of Exposition).

Or maybe it's not the dialogue. To be honest, I think it is better to say that the answer lies in the character of Sherlock Holmes himself. In his almost prescient ability to deduce the world around him:

“Wedlock suits you,” he remarked. “I think, Watson, that you have put on seven and a half pounds since I saw you.”

“Seven!” I answered.

“Indeed, I should have thought a little more. Just a trifle more, I fancy, Watson. And in practice again, I observe. You did not tell me that you intended to go into harness.”

“Then, how do you know?”

“I see it, I deduce it. How do I know that you have been getting yourself very wet lately, and that you have a most clumsy and careless servant girl?”

“My dear Holmes,” said I, “this is too much. You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago. It is true that I had a country walk on Thursday and came home in a dreadful mess, but as I have changed my clothes I can’t imagine how you deduce it. As to Mary Jane, she is incorrigible, and my wife has given her notice; but there, again, I fail to see how you work it out.”

He chuckled to himself and rubbed his long, nervous hands together.

“It is simplicity itself,” said he; “my eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant boot-slitting specimen of the London slavey. As to your practice, if a gentleman walks into my rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the right side of his top-hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be dull, indeed, if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the medical profession.”

I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his process of deduction. “When I hear you give your reasons,” I remarked, “the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good as yours.”

“Quite so,” he answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself down into an armchair. “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear (...)"

I think that the attraction is lies in two places, and that the above quote is close to it. First, there is the attraction of a compelling character, appearing in a consistent and entertaining universe. For all their crazy leaps of faith, the stories are interesting and their unraveling by Holmes and Watson are amusing. There is some eighteenth-century nostalgia, of course, some longing for the faux-romantic days of colonialism and empire and a globe filled with blank, white spaces on the maps, but that isn't the real attraction. The attraction lies in scenes precisely like the one above, in which Holmes makes sense of the world through observation and deductive reasoning.

Holmes is in effect the spectre of rationalism made literary flesh. He is, I think, more than any other literary character that I can think of offhand, the embodiment of mankind's desire to demystify the world, to shine light into every dark space to see that nothing dangerous is in there. Holmes is a man who completely masters the world, solely by the power of his own will, his mind, and his rationality. He is the avenger of rationalism. Eradicating disruptive elements (murderers, thieves, etc) from the world, he is the guarantor for man's desire for order. When he can do it, surely everyone can?

That is to say that he tickles this anal-sadistic desire of ours to be in control all the time. His literary image projects the idea into our minds that we are capable of this mastery. As such, reading Holmes becomes, in effect, wish-fullfilment. He gratifies the desire in us for evidence that the world can be mastered, even in the face of everything in the world which tells us that it can't be. Sherlock Holmes is, on some level, the gratification of infantile desires, somewhat on the same lines as, say, pornography, some fantasy litterature, bad crime novels, most superhero comics, martial arts movies, the whole string of para-literary, para-aesthetic, self-perpetuating literature.

As such, he is, to his very bones, a creature of the 1800s. He comes just at the cusp of the wave of industry, before everyone realized they were still in chains, that the world wasn't going anywhere. I suspect that, at the time, reading Holmes must have been an affirmation of the power of the human spirit. In this world, after mankind's two unsuccessful attempts at suicide, after Adorno and Horkheimer, he becomes something else entirely. A longing for the hopeful dreams of industry that were produced in the heart of Empire. Manufactured dreams, like the cocaine-ridden thoughts of Holmes himself.

And there's another thing: the cocaine. Perhaps AC Doyle knew what was happening to the world? This rational creature of his could only keep himself going by almost never engaging in friendship or love, only by a constant regimen of cocaine and other stimulants and depressants. Only through stimulants and manic introversion could his psyche sustain itself. As though he saw the unsustainable optimism hidden in his nature. The impossibility of his own enlightenment. Holmes is a coke fiend because he can't stand his own fictionality. He becomes the image of the artificial high of enlightenment, the crash unwritten, but waiting somewhere off the page. You can feel it coming, if you don't let the comfortable chair get too comfortable. Or, y'know, do cocaine while reading.

Sowing the wind

A fantastic op-ed piece in the NY Times a few days ago that I missed: The New York Times > Opinion >We Are All Torturers Now. It deals with mr Gonzales, who is "president" Bush's choice for Attorney General.

But what we are unlikely to hear, given the balance of votes in the Senate, are many voices making the obvious argument that with this record, Mr. Gonzales is unfit to serve as attorney general. So let me make it: Mr. Gonzales is unfit because the slow river of litigation is certain to bring before the next attorney general a raft of torture cases that challenge the very policies that he personally helped devise and put into practice. He is unfit because, while the attorney general is charged with upholding the law, the documents show that as White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales, in the matter of torture, helped his client to concoct strategies to circumvent it. And he is unfit, finally, because he has rightly become the symbol of the United States' fateful departure from a body of settled international law and human rights practice for which the country claims to stand.

I worked for Amnesty International for a few years. I did some reading on the question of torture. Critical studies, ethics papers on what cases are valid for using torture in times of crisis, etc.

The strange thing in reading about torture is that it is one of the few topics I have ever come across where every single item I read served to strengthen my understanding that I had been right to begin with. The picture just didn't move from my own exit position, it just got stronger and stronger support.

The justification arguments in the pro-torture-under-some-selected-circumstances-papers always end up being something a la "an atomic bomb is somewhere in NY city and for some odd reason, we can't scan for radiation, and we happen to know for sure that this one guy, named Mohammed, knows -for sure- where that bomb is, and how to disarm it, and we know that he'll only say it under torture, and besides we don't have time for anything else, because we know for sure that it will go off within the hour, and anyway..."

Pfft. No. This is not an episode of "24." It's people being tortured by our allies.

Hel-LO, spaceboy!

That's funny - I've listened to "Heathen" by David Bowie probably twenty times, and I've never realized that "I took a trip on a Gemini spacecraft" is actually just a reworking of one of my favourite standards: "I thought about you" by Van Heusen/Mercer. Jamais vu! How strange! I played it with my father just a week or so ago.

(Warning: Links have popups en masse. Get a google bar, or some other popup blocker.)

24 and counting

Meanwhile, 24 years and some several hours later, Martin woke up in the morning (which, in itself, was an accomplishment) and was a very, very happy man.

Echo chamber

Online discussion can evolve toward truth, said Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in the interactive telecommunications program at New York University and a blogger. One result is a process that can be more reliable than many new media, where corrections are often late and small, if they appear at all.

Dr. Shirky said the key to reasonable discussion was to get beyond flames and the "echo chamber" effect of like-minded people simply reinforcing the opinions of one another and to let the self-correcting mechanisms do their job in a civil way. "You hope the echo chamber effect and the fact-checking effect will balance out into a better and more nuanced set of narratives, and a more rigorously checked set of facts," he said. But in such a sharply contentious world, "The risk is it will largely divide itself into competing narratives where what even constitutes a fact is different in different camps."
(New York Times, 03.01.04)

The @ in the sidebar is a link my new Gmail account, which I got courtesy of the quite unbelievably fabulous ms. Annabel LiLee.

Nedstøvet notat

En ting jeg skrev ned i min lille svarte bok, mens jeg så bokbadet for over en måned siden, med intensjon om å poste det: et dialogutdrag fra "Bokbadet." Anne Grosvold her i samtale med noen som jeg antar er en av landets 450.000 Hamsun-biografer.

”Syntes du det er fælt å dikte [i biografier]?”
”Ja, i synes det e en vederstyggelighet.”
”Men når du skriver at ’her må Marie ha tenkt…’ det er jo litt på grensen, eller?”
”Men når i sier det, så har i vanligvis veldig gode kilder for å gjette.”

Bokbadet, 24. november.

In the continuing series "Martin announces the death, imminent demise, or imminent revival of cultural trends," I would like to turn now to irony.

Irony most certainly isn't dead. However, today I discovered a sign that it might be looking a bit down in the mouth. Maybe it's ill? Yes, the United States will during this coming year be withdrawing the "Peacekeeper" intercontinental ballistic missile from service.

That's right: the "Peacekeeper." Why do I only hear about these things when they stop being around?

Irony is dying! You heard it here first! Pass it on!

May you live in interesting times

The tsunami is already among the ten most deadly disasters in recorded history.

GODT NYTTÅR!

Vi var på nyttårsfest hos Øystein igår. Det ble fuktig, og var moro. Vi hadde egentlig tenkt oss dit idag for å hjelpe til med ryddinga, og delta i Det Store Baccalao-gildet som nødvendigvis må komme, men jeg våknet med et middels stort sagbruk på innsiden av hodet mitt, og tilbragte store deler av dagen i skytteltrafikk mellom sengen og den store hvite telefon. Like godt å få Årets Bakrus ut av veien på den aller første dagen.

Det var ellers høy bloggertetthet i Residensen (på et tidspunkt satt jeg, Øystein, Ragnfrid, og Silje ved siden av hverandre, med altså en bloggertetthet på ca. 2 per kvadratmeter, men uten at jeg klarte å ta et eneste bra bilde) og altså også flere digitalkameraer i mengden. En del bilder på Øysteins blogg. Jeg var visst linselus der borte, det var virkelig ikke meningen, men er glad for å se et så bra bilde av meg og min elskede. Også et bra bilde av Espen og Njord, samt to ubetalelige bilder av Øystein i lystig lag.

Takk til Øystein for en fin fest! Takk til alle for et godt liv! Jeg hadde det fantastisk ifjor, og ønsker dere alle et riktig godt nyttår, og takk for det gamle!


Nyttår på balkongen.

Fyrverkeri.

Kamera

Festen foreviges, her ved vår vert, Øystein.

En gang åpnet jeg så mange flasker champagne på rappen at jeg fikk brannsår i neven. Hver gang jeg viste det til folk sa de at jeg burde skaffe meg kjæreste. Heldigvis har jeg mer eller mindre sluttet i den bransjen nå.

Forvandling 2

Forvandling 1 (Ragnfrid goes Björk med mobiltelefon)