And finally, finally somebody is saying something sensible about that War... You know, on the noun.

talking the talk, blogging the blog

Three very interesting papers on academic blogging, all presented for the same session of the Modern Language Association conference. They've made me slightly wistful because I haven't been really using this blog enough for academic things, and now I'm in the final months of writing my MA thesis. The blog is a brilliant format for negotiating between the life of an institutionalised academic or just an intellectual in general, and the life of the public sphere. Somehow, the two are- or (it seems) have become increasingly antithetical, and that's just not right. Maybe I could have done this more while I was still a student. I suspect it would have been rewarding.

(As an sidenote or afterthought, if we want to increase the readership for the Norwegian academic blogosphere, maybe group blogs are a better idea than single-author blogs? How much interest one person can generate is, after all, fairly limited unless you write in English.)

Anyway, the three talks:

John Holbo's talk "Form Follows the Function of the Little Magazine" is a good and very enthusiastic rundown of the functions of academic blogging and possible and probable futures for it.

Bitch Ph.D's "I'm Nobody, Who Are You?" has some nice parallels between blogs and 18th century periodicals, some remarks on the public sphere, as well as an interesting take on pseudonymity which I think is really interesting (and which is part of the reason I became fascinated with her blog in the first place - it's an excellent rhetorical device).

Scott Eric Kaufman's talk is called "Talking, Endlessly Talking". It ties in well with the Norwegian debate on research credits for academic authors (small peer-reviewed articles in international magazines = good, publishing huge researchy books with any kind of pedagogic intentions = bad). Actually, the Holbo talk (above) ties in with this as well. As one commenter on that presentation said: academic publishing is turning into a kind of vanity publishing."

Kaufman:

Most write to impress, and not their audience either; no, they write to impress their committees, the tenure review boards, the functionaries of the literary-academic bureaucracy, and they do so at a speed which precludes revision. Advancement demands it. Their lives, our lives increasingly depend on the production of works we will know won't be read. "Professionalization" becomes code for the manufacture of unread and unreadable works superficially invested in a dialogue of diminishing stakes.

It also swerves into the same territory as a smaller debate that's been hopping around my circle of friends both on- and offline lately on the virtues of having or not having a difficult style of writing (and reading). That part of Kaufman's argument is mostly above the fold, and in the comment threads.

That said, I don't believe difficult-to-follow presentations have a place. If they're difficult for the sake of being difficult, they're performance; if they're difficult because they're articles read aloud, they're profoundly disrespectful of their audience; if they're difficult because they address subtle topics but the speaker recognizes the genre and medium and does his/her best, I don't mind. Some topics will be more difficult to discuss than others; but all topics, when read aloud from a text designed to be read silently, become difficult.

But then again, this post by Adam Kotsko makes all academic metablogging look... silly.

tydelige tegn på erosjonen av norsk høyere utdannelse

- De elendige, intetsigende notatene mine sidemenn på lesesalene på Blindern tar under lesningen av pensumlitteraturen sin.

- Mengden av urin på setet på universitetsbibliotekets toalett. Begrunnelsen for dette er at det er et Universitets. Bibliotek. Det utledes av dette 3 fakta. Brukerne av dette toalett a) er høyt utdannete, b) leser bøker, c) vet ikke at man tørker opp etter seg om man kommer til å pisse utenom, evt. hever setet for å forebygge denne begivenheten.

- Mengden av tyggis under lesesalspultene. Et månelandskap av tyggisfjell, som man oppdager med gru når man plutselig en dag lar hånden skli over bordets ru underside etter å ha sittet ved de samme fem bordene over en toukers-periode.

reality check

Martin Kolberg var nettopp på NRK og sa at grunnen til at Gerd-Liv Valla ikke lenger er lederen for Aps valgkomité er en prinsipiell debatt som har pågått lenge. Han sa at det ikke hadde noe å gjøre med Ingunn Yssen-saken.

I klartekst: Arbeiderpartiets representant i offentligheten lyver det norske folket rett opp i ansiktet uten å late som om han ikke gjør det engang. Jeg lurer på hva den slags åpenbar uærlighet gjør med den politiske offentligheten. Og så lurer jeg på hva han ønsker å oppnå med det. Uansett kan det kun være en feilslått retorisk strategi som sørger for at Ap taper ansikt.

A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies

back on the air

Sorry, altså. Ting har vært litt hektisk, men nå er vi trygt i Oslo, og installert i vårt hjem for de neste par månedene. Bilder kommer.

Hele dagen vi pakket de siste tingene ut av leiligheten i Bergen hadde jeg av åpenbare grunner åpningen til Georg Johannesens Ars Moriendi på hjernen:

MANDAG

Kommoder med åpne skuffer:
Flukt fra ulykker av begrenset omfang
Skred i en grøft og flom i et fat

Hud fant vi ikke, heller ikke klær
Hauger av begynnelser sank ned
Lampene var borte, pærene lå igjen

Det som ble funnet var foret i frakken
og det som er mellom barken og veden
den hvite hinnen mellom egget og skallet

Og da vi åpnet døren for å vise de nye leieboerne rundt, frontkolliderte to biler rett nedenfor leiligheten, heldigvis uten skadde. Det passet med diktet, og symbolikken var perfekt. (Linken over er til noen fotoer jeg tok av ulykken.)

Hvorfor er ulykkene av begrenset omfang? Fordi hvis de ikke var det ville man ikke hatt tid å pakke først.

Pausefisk

I pausen kan du nyte to bilder av meg som leser avisen iført et høyst usannsynlig ansiktsuttrykk borte hos Øystein. Jeg reagerer sikkert på at Erling Sandmo skriver et fint innlegg i Elsterdebatten og stjeler alle poengene Kristoffer og meg hadde lyst til å ha med i et innlegg vi egentlig hadde tenkt å skrive denne uken! WTF biatch??!? Men så husker jeg at han er på vår side i det neste bildet, og skriver mye bedre enn oss. Aaah.

Forresten var det ikke kun kameradocken jeg glemte i Bergen, det var også skjeggtrimmeren, som dere ser.

Og for riktig å drite meg selv ut nå, så kan dere jo også se dette blinkskuddet Øystein tok i sommer, da jeg hadde vært uten den selvsamme avisen i et par uker. Ansiktsuttrykket er litt overdrevet, men ikke mye.

[Intermission]

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—

(ALBATROSS!)

Chaaarge!

I've been slowly assembling a collage above my office desk for the past two years. At first it was just stuff I liked, needed to remember or had an interest in being hung semi-consciously on the wall. Eventually it became a conscious thing, adding documents and bits of stuff at random. It seems to me now that it documents parts of my life these past couple of years in ways I would never have thought of consciously.

I like the collage as an art form, and I also think of the collage as a metaphor for what I'm doing on this blog: assembling bits and pieces of stuff that both document and participate in the formation of my mental space. If my mind is a room, this blog is the collage on the wall, and you lot come in and scribble your own notes on it. That's actually what I really like the most about it.

Today, the collage came off the wall and I feel very strange about it. I made a photoset of it on Flickr as a sort of documentation.

Oh, and just as an extra little memento mori-ish kinda tempus fugit kinda all-things-must-pass-kinda thing, it's now past midnight and that means I'm 26 years old. Hurrah!

Coincidentally, I once heard that the word hurrah is a Turkish war cry from around the time of the crusades which got caught up in Prussian culture and thus further into Scandinavian and Anglo-saxic languages. I like the idea of yelling hurrah as actually meaning "CHAAAARGE!" By Jove, I shall make it my motto for this year.

Remember that paper on the rhetoric of PowerPoint Jens Kjeldsen wrote, and which I commented on? Well, here's a perfect example (mentioned by Kjeldsen, I think) of how bad things can get: a paper analyzing how PowerPoint slides played a significant part in the death of the astronauts aboard the Columbia.

Liff as we know it

Ion points out that Douglas Adams' The Meaning of Liff is online in its entirety. If you haven't read this book your life (and indeed your Liff) is dreadfully incomplete. What Adams did was that he took funny place names from maps and signs and invented descriptions for the words. In the process, he was wonderfully observant, describing situations everyone recognizes, but which there are no words for. I could go off on a Rortyish pragmatic tangent here about how language isn't "true" or conveys "truth" and how Adams makes an immensely funny and interesting linguistic point with all this, but I recognize that I've been talking about these things too much lately, so I'll just leave the funny bits for you.

Here are some old favourites of mine:

ABILENE (adj.)
Descriptive of the pleasing coolness on the reverse side of the pillow.

AHENNY (adj.)
The way people stand when examining other people's bookshelves.

AMERSHAM (n.)
The sneeze which tickles but never comes. (Thought to derive from the Metropolitan Line tube station of the same name where the rails always rattle but the train never arrives.)

CLIXBY (adj.)
Politely rude. Bliskly vague. Firmly uninformative.

CLUNES (pl.n.)
People who just won't go.

DAMNAGLAUR (n.)
A certain facial expression which actors are required to demonstrate their mastery of before they are allowed to play Macbeth.

DETCHANT (n.)
That part of a hymn (usually a few notes at the end of a verse) where the tune goes so high or low that you suddenly have to change octaves to accommodate it.

DULEEK (n.)
Sudden realisation, as you lie in bed waiting for the alarm to go off, that it should have gone off an hour ago.

DUNBOYNE (n.)
The moment of realisation that the train you have just patiently watched pulling out of the station was the one you were meant to be on.

DUNTISH (adj.)
Mentally incapacitated by severe hangover.

KALAMI (n.)
The ancient Eastern art of being able to fold road-maps properly.

NUBBOCK (n.)
The kind of person who has to leave before a party can relax and enjoy itself.

I could go on and on, so I'll just let you read the rest yourself.

Stop the press! The egg came first!

May I be the first to say "duh" and "hello?" and "I knew this when I was eight years old" and also "what's with the really bad pun in the headline?"

Møte med Gåsa

Dette er et bilde av meg som skjærer opp en gås. Jeg stekte den til 7 mennesker nyttårsaften. Det var min første gås, og jeg er fornøyd med resultatet. Den kunne kanskje ha vært litt mørere, og hvis jeg skal ta selvkritikk var det vel kanskje en litt tam saus jeg lagde.

Her er et bilde av en gås jeg møtte på vei ut til mine foreldre idag. Det var årets første blåmandag. Solen gikk ned før den sto opp, og jeg klarte nesten ikke å få nok lys, derav den noe overdrevne Blenda-hvite fargen på gåsa. Den stilte seg opp til rekkverket og snadret iherdig til meg. Så hoppet den opp på kanten og begynte å deklamere dikt:

TIL LI PO

Når kalde vinder møter deg fra alle kanter
Hvordan har du det da, hva tenker du på?
Når flyr en villgås hit med et brev fra deg?
I en høstlig innsjø leser du mine tanker:
Diktets gud rår ikke over lykkens himmel
I nærheten av et godt menneske flirer alltid en djevel
Derfor kastet engang en dikter seg i en sjø
I hver vår elv skal vi i dag kaste hvert vårt dikt

(Georg Johannesen etter Tu Fu)

Og så dro den en masse dikt fra Tu Fu. Etterhvert begynte den også på haiku:

i min hjemby
som jeg har forlatt
blomstrer kirsebærtrærne

"Den hadde ikke 5-7-5, din dumme gås, og dessuten har jo ikke kirsebærtrærne blomstret på over et halvt år!" sa jeg irritert.
"Det er en oversettelse av Issa, og dessuten er den der 5-7-5-inndelingen helt arbitrær, ditt kulturløse beinrangel" snadret den tilbake, og la til: "kvakk".

Den ga meg noe å tenke på. Om fire dager forlater jeg min hjemby etter 17 år. Men jeg hadde allerede spist dens fetter, Gary, fra Polen (som jeg fikk et lite oppstøt av akkurat da). Den døde gåsa ble ikke levende igjen og kirsebærtrærne blomstrer fremdeles ikke på fem måneder. Men sånn pleier det jo å være.



Godt nyttår, alle sammen. Takk for det gamle.

(raaap)

Martin