the digital ads on this train are explaining how to prepare cherry blossom cookies, which feels like something one would definitely go home and do after a rudimentary subway tutorial. i had a magisterial run of mixed berry crumbles on winter weekends this year and have a solid dessert in my back pocket if we have anyone over for dinner ever again, which is not impossible. we flew home from iceland on may first, which is our newyorkaversary (observed) and maybe even the actual day we flew to new york from san francisco in 2003–my blog posts then aren't explicit about our arrival, though it would be unlikely that the seat-back TVs on the plane from california were covering bush's flight-jackety MISSION ACCOMPLISHED appearance on that aircraft carrier in such detail if it had happened the day before? i wasn't quite the bottomless news pit then that i am now, so i lack tasting notes.
i spoke to my therapist for the first time yesterday since our icelanding, and i think my anecdotes–of landing after a redeye and spontaneously deciding to run the national first-day-of-summer 5k that same morning, stalking the one antiquarian bookseller in reykjavik and then bonding with him, after securing two new-to-me editions of nineteen eighty-four in icelandic, over the fact that both of us needed to start writing poetry again, &c–might have disappointed her a bit. she's a wonderful person and i have no doubt that she wants me to be well, but maybe the fact that my sobriety is starting to feel a bit old hat and i'm not feeling gaslit by erstwhile old friends means we can redirect our respective resources a bit? i'm not interested in being the gal who gives up a practice that is working because it is working, but i do think we've plateaued in terms of those initial tribulations and might need to move on to something else. i'm reminded of the time i got locked out of our san francisco apartment and asked the locksmith, after he'd sheared through the deadbolt joe had so carefully installed on the back door, if he'd show me how to pick the lock on our front door. i am ready to break new houses! (ask me about lock picking with a two-liter soda bottle sometime, it's pretty boss.)
Showing posts with label iceland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iceland. Show all posts
08.07.21
so this comparatively-unknown literary magazine just published this creepy sexual poem named for and about a very well known writer whose bestselling essay collection i read a year or two ago and whose parents, i read last night when i was struggling to fall asleep, were once investigated for human trafficking, as someone discovered last year? (lit twitter and weird twitter and weird lit twitter are all over this, the poem, because it's both unsporting clickbait and because the writing is so bad that it's typically referred to as "the poem," the loose consensus is that one should avoid it if possible, for both reasons).*
when i finally went down around five this morning i dreamed that i went to a new, fancy salon-retail-organic-garden** hybrid place, for i needed a haircut, and my stylist was the writer. i explained to her that i envisioned bangs, but she would have to come up with some way to texturize them because i have a cowlick at my right temple and my hair has always parted like curtains right there. i also wanted a pretty short pixie cut, but skewing femme, please, so go soft at the edges and follow a rounded shape at the back of my head, but otherwise i trusted her to do whatever she thought was right. things started off badly, as she accused me of leaving bleach on for far too long when i prepped for dyeing my hair blue at home (true, i ended up with some little scabs last time after frying myself), and then she kept wandering off. the appointment began in the early afternoon, but by early evening we were under a scraggly live oak in the organic garden and the writer still hadn't gotten to work. i knelt before her as though we were gawain and the green knight*** as she finally, finally, started to razor the back of my neck. "if you had a boob**** that was floating in a vat of fluid, what would you do to make it float higher or lower? that's what you can think about while i do this," she said. one of the dickensian orphans gathered around us piped up: one should add stones to the vat, which would increase the volume of its contents and elevate the boob. that's stupid, i said. i would add a fluid with lower specific gravity than that of the boob-fluid if i wanted the boob to sink, and a fluid with higher specific gravity if i wanted it to rise.
when i finally went down around five this morning i dreamed that i went to a new, fancy salon-retail-organic-garden** hybrid place, for i needed a haircut, and my stylist was the writer. i explained to her that i envisioned bangs, but she would have to come up with some way to texturize them because i have a cowlick at my right temple and my hair has always parted like curtains right there. i also wanted a pretty short pixie cut, but skewing femme, please, so go soft at the edges and follow a rounded shape at the back of my head, but otherwise i trusted her to do whatever she thought was right. things started off badly, as she accused me of leaving bleach on for far too long when i prepped for dyeing my hair blue at home (true, i ended up with some little scabs last time after frying myself), and then she kept wandering off. the appointment began in the early afternoon, but by early evening we were under a scraggly live oak in the organic garden and the writer still hadn't gotten to work. i knelt before her as though we were gawain and the green knight*** as she finally, finally, started to razor the back of my neck. "if you had a boob**** that was floating in a vat of fluid, what would you do to make it float higher or lower? that's what you can think about while i do this," she said. one of the dickensian orphans gathered around us piped up: one should add stones to the vat, which would increase the volume of its contents and elevate the boob. that's stupid, i said. i would add a fluid with lower specific gravity than that of the boob-fluid if i wanted the boob to sink, and a fluid with higher specific gravity if i wanted it to rise.
*i immediately found and read it, and i'm now sorry to have given it a click and to have those lines in my head, but here we are.
**i'm on a nordic-authors kick and halfway through auður ava ólafsdóttir's the greenhouse, which i'm enjoying; her miss iceland is a fascinating look at her country's bro-centric midcentury literary culture.
***we saw that movie yesterday; i thought it was quite grand, particularly alicia vikander's green speech, though the CGI fox wasn't animated very realistically.
****ólafsdóttir's hotel silence, also good, concludes with the recovery of three disembodied breasts. like japanese in translation, icelandic in translation has, i find, a very distinctive/characteristic(?) cadence, and it's soothing.
08.27.14
at JFK i overheard her telling another member of our group that she'd once gone to the ukrainian border to examine the potatoes grown for chopin vodka, but i'd have picked her out anyway: there's a certain kind of lightweight trench coat one only sees on traveling wine-and-spirits journalists. when we were on the jetway waiting to board our plane to reykjavik, her companion wondered if martin miller was still alive. "he died in december," i blurted, because i am only sometimes able to remember that real life is not like watching jeopardy! in your living room.
we coincided a few days later when i was working my way through the group with questions about ethics; it had shocked me to learn that, for example, the new york times asks its travel writers to sign statements saying that they haven't taken a press trip in the last five years (my magazine allows its writers to go on press trips and has given its blessing for each of mine). she'd just written a book about press trips, as it happened. her co-author used a pseudonym; "i, of course, will be the baroness," she said.
i didn't really get the baroness thing until we shared an armrest on our flight back to new york the next morning. i mentioned somewhere over greenland that joe and i would be celebrating our wedding anniversary that week, and she told me that her marriage had soured quickly. she'd lived in her husband's castle for four years,* she told me, and was miserable; after nine years, he wrote a single line—I DISINHERIT MY WIFE—and killed himself with a shotgun.
we exchanged contact info when we parted at customs. "i don't have my other cards with me," she said, "so i'll give you a baroness card." "i haven't got one of those yet," i said, and she laughed.
*09.16.14: four months, that is (i tracked down a copy of her memoir and just finished it).
08.22.14
i flew home from iceland on tuesday morning just before another flurry of earthquakes turned the aviation alert orange. i don't really want bárðarbunga to erupt and flatten the tourism industry again, but i wouldn't have minded being stuck in reykjavik for a while.
teach yourself icelandic
mér er kalt á fótunum, i have cold feet
á laun, in secret
jafna sig, steady oneself
vera i goðu skapi, to be in good spirits
innst í hjarta sínu, in his innermost heart
hábúar (colloq.), "air-dwellings"
10.23.13
101 in 1001 {III}: 037 read three library books [completed 10.13.13]
III: OUTRAGE, ARNALDUR INDRIDASON. in some ways outrage, an icelandic thriller, seems hyperconscious of the nordic-crime-fiction juggernaut that is stieg larsson's millennium trilogy: the title refers to rape (the first of larsson's books was called men who hate women in swedish), and indriðason's leading man, crotchety old inspector erlendur, has gone on a vision quest in eastern iceland and left reykjavik's latest murder mystery to elínborg, a female member of the reykjavik police force (and a secondary character in indriðason's previous novels). in other, more important ways, it's like that episode of space ghost coast to coast where space ghost follows an ant for ten minutes: icelanders, bless their hearts, dance like there's nobody watching. witness a stakeout with elínborg outside edvard's house (edvard might or might not know who killed runólfur, a creepy guy found dead in his apartment in a tiny san francisco tee shirt):
like indriðason's novels which are not jar city (his first inspector erlendur book, far and away his best), outrage doesn't quite tweak the wrinkles in one's brain which blockbuster english-language murder-mystery-thrillers traditionally tweak: the pacing is all over the place, the translation thumps unexpectedly into potholes of british slang, and the case itself is of limited interest. then again, i've never really gone to them for that; i started showing up for a cheap iceland fix, and now that i've been to iceland a few times, i keep coming back for (the weird-ass dancing and) the little revelations of cultural character. halldór laxness's nobel-winning, majestic-as-shit independent people is a gorgeous way to think about icelanders, but one should leaven that impression with pop culture, i think. one should always leaven with pop.
III: OUTRAGE, ARNALDUR INDRIDASON. in some ways outrage, an icelandic thriller, seems hyperconscious of the nordic-crime-fiction juggernaut that is stieg larsson's millennium trilogy: the title refers to rape (the first of larsson's books was called men who hate women in swedish), and indriðason's leading man, crotchety old inspector erlendur, has gone on a vision quest in eastern iceland and left reykjavik's latest murder mystery to elínborg, a female member of the reykjavik police force (and a secondary character in indriðason's previous novels). in other, more important ways, it's like that episode of space ghost coast to coast where space ghost follows an ant for ten minutes: icelanders, bless their hearts, dance like there's nobody watching. witness a stakeout with elínborg outside edvard's house (edvard might or might not know who killed runólfur, a creepy guy found dead in his apartment in a tiny san francisco tee shirt):
The car was chilly but she did not want to keep the engine running and risk drawing attention to her presence. She was also reluctant to pollute the atmosphere more than necessary. She never left the engine running when the car was stationary - it was practically the only cast-iron rule she observed as a driver.elínborg is as methodical as erlendur is erratic, and iceland's impeccable national databases and tiny population suit her style of police work perfectly: when one of runólfur's neighbors mentions she saw a man limp down the street in a leg brace on the night of the murder, she tracks down and interviews each and every male icelander of a certain age who had polio. she also finds a woman's scarf beneath runólfur's bed and notices that it smells like tandoori; alors, time to consult the one place in reykjavik that sells tandoori pots. this is a particularly lucky break, as elínborg knows it well.
Perhaps [the mystery woman] worked in a restaurant that served tandoori dishes. Elínborg knew something about tandoori cookery, and had even included some tandoori dishes in the cookery book that she had published. She had read up on tandoori cuisine and felt pretty well-informed about it. She owned two different clay tandoori pots. In India they would traditionally be heated in a pit filled with burning charcoal so that the meat was cooked evenly from all sides at a high temperature. Elínborg had occasionally buried a tandoori pot in her back garden in the authentic manner, but usually she put it in the oven or heated it over charcoal on an old barbecue. The crucial factor was the marinade, for which Elínborg used a combination of spices, blending them to taste with plain yoghurt. For a red colour she added ground annatto seed; for yellow, saffron. She generally experimented with a mixture of cayenne pepper, coriander, ginger and garlic, or with a garam masala that she made herself by using roasted or ground cardamom, cumin, cinnamon, garlic and black pepper, with a little nutmeg. She had also been trying out variations using Icelandic herbs such as wild thyme, angelica root, dandelion leaves and lovage. She would rub the marinade into the meat - chicken or pork - and leave it for several hours before it went into the tandoori pot. sometimes a little of the marinade would splash on the hot coals, bringing out more strongly the tangy tandoori fragrance that Elínborg had smelt on the shawl. She wondered if the woman they were looking for might have a job in Indian cookery. Or perhaps, like Elínborg, she was simply interested in Indian food, or even specifically in tandoori dishes. She too might have a tandoori pot in her kitchen, along with all the spices that made the dish so mouth-watering.wild icelandic herbs in tandoori, by the by, are delicious; take it from me, i've been to austur-indíafjelagið twice.
like indriðason's novels which are not jar city (his first inspector erlendur book, far and away his best), outrage doesn't quite tweak the wrinkles in one's brain which blockbuster english-language murder-mystery-thrillers traditionally tweak: the pacing is all over the place, the translation thumps unexpectedly into potholes of british slang, and the case itself is of limited interest. then again, i've never really gone to them for that; i started showing up for a cheap iceland fix, and now that i've been to iceland a few times, i keep coming back for (the weird-ass dancing and) the little revelations of cultural character. halldór laxness's nobel-winning, majestic-as-shit independent people is a gorgeous way to think about icelanders, but one should leaven that impression with pop culture, i think. one should always leaven with pop.
01.10.13
In the previous episode of The Library, masked pirate-magicians said they would sell Prince Wing a cure for the spell that infested Faithful Margaret's hair with miniature, wicked, fire-breathing golems. (Faithful Margaret's hair keeps catching fire, but she refuses to shave it off. Her hair is the source of all her magic.)
The pirate-magicians lured Prince Wing into a trap so obvious that it seemed impossible it could really be a trap, on the one-hundred-and-fortieth floor of The Free People's World-Tree Library. The pirate-magicians used finger magic to turn Prince Wing into a porcelain teapot, put two Earl Grey tea bags into the teapot, and poured in boiling water, toasted the Eternally Postponed and Overdue Reign of the Forbidden Books, drained their tea in one gulp, belched, hurled their souvenir pirate mugs to the ground, and then shattered the teapot that had been Prince Wing into hundreds of pieces. Then the wicked pirate-magicians swept the pieces of both Prince Wing and collectable mugs carelessly into a wooden cigar box, buried the box in the Angela Carter Memorial Park on the seventeenth floor of the World-Tree Library, and erected a statue of George Washington over it.
(kelly link, from "magic for beginners")
12.21.12
101 in 1001 {III}: 009 go whalewatching [completed 09.28.12]
though the whalewatching trip we took in iceland this september was my first, i think i can say that it was unlike what we would have experienced anywhere else. in mexico's sea of cortez, the harpoon-scarred gray whales of baja surface near boats, their babies at their sides: though we're utterly undeserving, they've forgiven the awestruck humans who come to them in peace. it's not like that in the north atlantic, not where we were. icelandic whalers ignore international regulations, and it's getting worse: in the 2010 hunt alone, 148 endangered fin whales and 60 minke whales were killed (the united states considered sanctions against iceland last year, but obama declined to invoke the pelly amendment). cognitive dissonance among icelanders outside of the whaling industry is pretty intense: while only 5% of them claim to eat whale regularly, some pollsters report that up to 75% of icelanders believe that whalers should be permitted to continue. japan imports the majority of the whalers' meat, but it's estimated that 40% of tourists in iceland eat it - which is where we came in. elding, the whalewatching company we chose, takes the "meet us don't eat us" campaign very seriously, and our golden-haired guide spent most of the trip from grindavík out to sea pleading with us on the whales' behalf. nothing abstract about that: she sounded close to tears at a few points, and there the minke whale was on the menu at dinner later that night, beside smoked puffin as part of a "taste of iceland" special. it's pronounced "minky," that whale's name. you can eat a minky whale.
that's the backstory - but the watching, now. we had planned to depart from reykjavik's old harbour, but the wind whipping into the bay wasn't interested in that; instead, we took the slowest double-decker bus in iceland (the only double-decker bus in iceland?) to a little fishing village forty minutes down the road. if the harbor at grindavík was considered placid, i shudder to think of what we left behind. i swallowed my gratis seasickness tablet like a good landlubber and have an unremarkable relationship with most vehicles, but when we left port and i went belowdecks for my industrial strength whalewatchin' onesie (the north atlantic is, unsurprisingly, colder than shit) i lost my abilities to walk in a straight line, stand upright, and speak english for a good twenty minutes or so. (extra-confusing when i rejoined joe, since the icelanders we met already thought he was a local. i think it was the beard.) that settled the issue of whether or not i would attempt creature-photography; in the absence of both fine motor skills and one of the semiautomatic, massive-barreled cameras the tourists around us were sporting (how close can you feel to a subject when there's a yard of equipment between you and your own lens, to say nothing of the distance between you and it?), i decided to document any whales we watched with, you know, my feelings.
september falls at the far reaches of whalewatching season, as most of the local baleen whale population migrates to warmer waters at summer's end, and it was clear from the way our guide was hyping dolphins that she didn't have high hopes for the afternoon. then, o then, the smallest spout at ten o'clock! at one o'clock! at one o'clock again! when it seemed the mysterious spouter was heading in a straight line, we followed it at a respectful distance, and our guide's voice rose in joy from the crow's nest: "and there's the fluke! it's a humpback!" the migration sometimes leaves younger whales behind, you see, and we found one, probably planning the whale-equivalent of a filmic eighties house party when one's parents are out of town. we followed his spouts and dives for an hour; we all knew where to look, but that joyous, lilting "and the fluke!" rang out each time he dove again. that happiness is as integral to my memory of the day as that magnificent tail.
though the whalewatching trip we took in iceland this september was my first, i think i can say that it was unlike what we would have experienced anywhere else. in mexico's sea of cortez, the harpoon-scarred gray whales of baja surface near boats, their babies at their sides: though we're utterly undeserving, they've forgiven the awestruck humans who come to them in peace. it's not like that in the north atlantic, not where we were. icelandic whalers ignore international regulations, and it's getting worse: in the 2010 hunt alone, 148 endangered fin whales and 60 minke whales were killed (the united states considered sanctions against iceland last year, but obama declined to invoke the pelly amendment). cognitive dissonance among icelanders outside of the whaling industry is pretty intense: while only 5% of them claim to eat whale regularly, some pollsters report that up to 75% of icelanders believe that whalers should be permitted to continue. japan imports the majority of the whalers' meat, but it's estimated that 40% of tourists in iceland eat it - which is where we came in. elding, the whalewatching company we chose, takes the "meet us don't eat us" campaign very seriously, and our golden-haired guide spent most of the trip from grindavík out to sea pleading with us on the whales' behalf. nothing abstract about that: she sounded close to tears at a few points, and there the minke whale was on the menu at dinner later that night, beside smoked puffin as part of a "taste of iceland" special. it's pronounced "minky," that whale's name. you can eat a minky whale.
that's the backstory - but the watching, now. we had planned to depart from reykjavik's old harbour, but the wind whipping into the bay wasn't interested in that; instead, we took the slowest double-decker bus in iceland (the only double-decker bus in iceland?) to a little fishing village forty minutes down the road. if the harbor at grindavík was considered placid, i shudder to think of what we left behind. i swallowed my gratis seasickness tablet like a good landlubber and have an unremarkable relationship with most vehicles, but when we left port and i went belowdecks for my industrial strength whalewatchin' onesie (the north atlantic is, unsurprisingly, colder than shit) i lost my abilities to walk in a straight line, stand upright, and speak english for a good twenty minutes or so. (extra-confusing when i rejoined joe, since the icelanders we met already thought he was a local. i think it was the beard.) that settled the issue of whether or not i would attempt creature-photography; in the absence of both fine motor skills and one of the semiautomatic, massive-barreled cameras the tourists around us were sporting (how close can you feel to a subject when there's a yard of equipment between you and your own lens, to say nothing of the distance between you and it?), i decided to document any whales we watched with, you know, my feelings.
september falls at the far reaches of whalewatching season, as most of the local baleen whale population migrates to warmer waters at summer's end, and it was clear from the way our guide was hyping dolphins that she didn't have high hopes for the afternoon. then, o then, the smallest spout at ten o'clock! at one o'clock! at one o'clock again! when it seemed the mysterious spouter was heading in a straight line, we followed it at a respectful distance, and our guide's voice rose in joy from the crow's nest: "and there's the fluke! it's a humpback!" the migration sometimes leaves younger whales behind, you see, and we found one, probably planning the whale-equivalent of a filmic eighties house party when one's parents are out of town. we followed his spouts and dives for an hour; we all knew where to look, but that joyous, lilting "and the fluke!" rang out each time he dove again. that happiness is as integral to my memory of the day as that magnificent tail.
10.09.12
101 in 1001 {III}: 089 attend lunch beat [completed 09.27.12]
the lunch beat movement (workers of the world, get together at clubs instead of hunching over your desks with bad sandwiches!) began, as so many things do, with a bunch of people dancing in a garage in stockholm:
iceland was all, 'HELL nei.' at noon on a grey reykjavik thursday, joe and i were on our way down laugavegur en route tobreakfast lunch when the earnest oom-oom of a local dj set drifted up the street. LUNCH BEAT 4, said a flyer on the door at hemmi og valdi. done and done.
single gentlemen of reyjkavik and elsewhere, how do you feel about dancing in the afternoon? the lunch beat ratio of ladies to fellows was something like five to one. were i a bachelor, i'd put on a tie and follow the flyers. (joe was wearing a tie, for that is how he vacations.) iceland, you continue to expand my horizons (and that was a very fine remix of "my baby shot me down," dj margeir).
the lunch beat movement (workers of the world, get together at clubs instead of hunching over your desks with bad sandwiches!) began, as so many things do, with a bunch of people dancing in a garage in stockholm:
The founder says she was inspired by the film Fight Club to write a manifesto for Lunch Beat.dry afternoon dance parties from which one has to return to one's job (and the new york one's all the way over in long island city)? they sounded like the opposite of everything i stand for, really, but i try to build a bit of personal growth into my 101 in 1001 lists. it wouldn't kill me to go to long island city, and dance, and smile at people instead of biting them, probably.
“The first rule is if it’s your first time at Lunch Beat, you have to dance,” Jaques says. “The second rule is, if it’s your second time at Lunch Beat, you still have to dance.”
There are other rules. You don’t talk about your job at Lunch Beat. Water must be served as well as a take-away meal. No alcohol or drugs. Lunch Beats can’t be longer than 60 minutes and must happen during “lunch time.”
iceland was all, 'HELL nei.' at noon on a grey reykjavik thursday, joe and i were on our way down laugavegur en route to
single gentlemen of reyjkavik and elsewhere, how do you feel about dancing in the afternoon? the lunch beat ratio of ladies to fellows was something like five to one. were i a bachelor, i'd put on a tie and follow the flyers. (joe was wearing a tie, for that is how he vacations.) iceland, you continue to expand my horizons (and that was a very fine remix of "my baby shot me down," dj margeir).
10.04.12
as, per the commenting message below, the new and fantastically improved website (version guttersnipe point phlox) is still in the oven, i can't actually converse with you about my travels, dear ones; i can, however, present with great pride a shot of joe on our balcony in reykjavik, brandishing one of the sparklers i smuggled through three countries. the lights floating above joe's elbow are the observation tower at hallgrimskirkja. kidchamp dot net: affection, fireworks, and points of light on foreign shores.
09.15.12
101 in 1001 {III}: 010 see the northern lights [completed 09.13.12]
i was dozing under my coat when joe nudged me awake and nodded to the window at his shoulder. there they were, just as our plane began its arc over nova scotia, green as jealousy and fresh from an ancient god's pen. the northern lights are calligraphy, you see; i've seen them and i know it in my bones.
i was dozing under my coat when joe nudged me awake and nodded to the window at his shoulder. there they were, just as our plane began its arc over nova scotia, green as jealousy and fresh from an ancient god's pen. the northern lights are calligraphy, you see; i've seen them and i know it in my bones.
09.20.11
THUNDERTOME II: ROUND 6
SURVIVOR: anna karenina (leo tolstoy)*
CHALLENGER: the long ships (frans g. bengtsson)
joe and i spent an hour in a danish bar on ingólfsstræti when we were in reykjavik in march. it was just the sort of dour nordic place you'd envision after reading a bunch of stieg larsson novels:** the carpet smelled of old lager and misanthropy, a couple of crew-cut older men were sitting by themselves and scowling at their newspapers, and the bartender seemed mortified when i asked for the house darts. it was a far cry from the tentative-but-ultimately-jolly bar scenes everywhere else in town, and it made me so sad for denmark; just think of all the dead and dying dreams that must have seeped into its gorgeous midcentury furniture.
i was leery of that fuggy danish manliness when, as i purchased michael chabon's wonder boys several months ago, amazon first tried to sell me on frans g. bengtsson's the long ships.*** what could a seventy-year-old novel about a-viking a thousand years ago (note that "viking" is both a noun and a gerund here; vikings go a-viking) have for me? chabon's gushy paris review essay introduces the long ships, and he will brook no skepticism: "[T]his novel, first published in Sweden during the Second World War, stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to every single human being on the face of the earth. [...] When you arrive at its bittersweet, but mostly sweet, conclusion, I trust that you will turn to your shipmate, your companion in adventure, and swear by ancient oaths, as I hereby swear to you: It is really good." well, i liked the master and commander movie back in the day, and that was a sausage party on the high seas. why not?
the long ships follows orm tostesson, a doughty young skanian son-of-a-thane who's clocked with an axe while defending the family sheep from marauding jomsvikings; he's spirited away with the livestock so that he can row in place of the man he killed and is a valued member of the crew until he's captured and enslaved by the caliph of córdoba. the long ships is full of enslavement and re-enslavement on all sides - women in particular tend to get smuggled around in barrels and dangled from the sides of ships - but the principals seem to take it in stride (as do a few of the women?), much as a taxi driver does when you cut him off for once. hauled from your ship and tossed ashore to grow limp like produce while your captors prep new shackles for you? ah, well; best to compose poetry and save your strength so that you'll be ready when the time comes to drown your overseer in boiling pitch. equal emphasis on the poetry and the pitch.****
THUNDERTOME II: ROUND 6
SURVIVOR: anna karenina (leo tolstoy)*
CHALLENGER: the long ships (frans g. bengtsson)
joe and i spent an hour in a danish bar on ingólfsstræti when we were in reykjavik in march. it was just the sort of dour nordic place you'd envision after reading a bunch of stieg larsson novels:** the carpet smelled of old lager and misanthropy, a couple of crew-cut older men were sitting by themselves and scowling at their newspapers, and the bartender seemed mortified when i asked for the house darts. it was a far cry from the tentative-but-ultimately-jolly bar scenes everywhere else in town, and it made me so sad for denmark; just think of all the dead and dying dreams that must have seeped into its gorgeous midcentury furniture.
i was leery of that fuggy danish manliness when, as i purchased michael chabon's wonder boys several months ago, amazon first tried to sell me on frans g. bengtsson's the long ships.*** what could a seventy-year-old novel about a-viking a thousand years ago (note that "viking" is both a noun and a gerund here; vikings go a-viking) have for me? chabon's gushy paris review essay introduces the long ships, and he will brook no skepticism: "[T]his novel, first published in Sweden during the Second World War, stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to every single human being on the face of the earth. [...] When you arrive at its bittersweet, but mostly sweet, conclusion, I trust that you will turn to your shipmate, your companion in adventure, and swear by ancient oaths, as I hereby swear to you: It is really good." well, i liked the master and commander movie back in the day, and that was a sausage party on the high seas. why not?
the long ships follows orm tostesson, a doughty young skanian son-of-a-thane who's clocked with an axe while defending the family sheep from marauding jomsvikings; he's spirited away with the livestock so that he can row in place of the man he killed and is a valued member of the crew until he's captured and enslaved by the caliph of córdoba. the long ships is full of enslavement and re-enslavement on all sides - women in particular tend to get smuggled around in barrels and dangled from the sides of ships - but the principals seem to take it in stride (as do a few of the women?), much as a taxi driver does when you cut him off for once. hauled from your ship and tossed ashore to grow limp like produce while your captors prep new shackles for you? ah, well; best to compose poetry and save your strength so that you'll be ready when the time comes to drown your overseer in boiling pitch. equal emphasis on the poetry and the pitch.****
So the Vikings were defeated, and their victors rowed ashore to examine what they had won and to bury their dead. They cleared the decks of the ship they had captured, throwing the corpses overboard, and began to rummage through its cargo, while the prisoners were led ashore and sat down on the beach, well guarded, with their arms bound. There were nine of them, all wounded. They waited for death, staring silently out to sea; bout there was no sign of Berse's ships or of their pursuers.oh, snap! predictably, the (frequent) nordic poetry slams are my favorite bits of the long ships; less predictably, perhaps, they jostle for favor with all sorts of things. i had an acute renaissance faire phase in elementary school / junior high / (cough) high school (i was wa-ay over at the wizardy end of the nerd spectrum), and it should go without saying that i enjoy an enthusiastic yuletide death match; i also enjoy viking curses ("may she toss perpetually in the whirlpool of hell among sword-blades and serpents' fangs!"), practicality ("It takes time for landlubbers to appreciate the beauty of life at sea. With this wind, though, they can vomit to windward without its blowing back into the face of the next man, and many quarrels between irritable persons will thereby be avoided."), and tolerance.
Toke sighed and began to mumble to himself. Then he said:
"Once, thirsty, I
Wasted good ale.
Soon shall I taste
Valhalla's mead."
Orm lay on his back, gazing up at the sky. He said:
"At home in the house
That saw me grow
Would I were seated now
Eating sour milk and bread."
But none of them was sicker at heart than Krok; for ever since the beginning of their expedition, he had regarded himself as a lucky man and as a hero, and now he had seen his luck crumble within the hour. He watched them throwing his dead followers overboard from what had been his ship, and said:
"The plowers of the sea
Earned for their toil
Misfortune and a foul
And early death."
Toke observed that this was a remarkable coincidence, that three poets should be found in such a company.
"Even if you cannot fully match my skill at composing verses," he said, "yet be of good cheer. Remember that it is granted to the poets to drink from the largest horn at the banquet of the gods."
Brother Willibald bent down, picked up a large stone, and flung it with all his might.unlike chabon, i wouldn't argue that the long ships has something for everyone; i lent it to my friend megan, one of the most valiant readers i know, and she failed (though she strove mightily) to appreciate orm and his colleagues; she failed, in fact, to make it through the book at all. how, then, is one to know if it's worth one's while?
"Love thy neighbor!" he grunted as it left his hand.
The stone struck King Sven full on the mouth with a loud smack. With a howl of agony, he crumpled on the horse's mane and slithered to the ground.
"That is what I call a good priest," said Rapp.
More years ago than I like to recall, I was a student of medieval literature at Cornell University. During my first year of graduate school I signed up for Old English, Introduction to Medieval French, Chaucer, Middle High German Literature, and the Icelandic Saga in Translation--we were serious students in those days. I learned a lot, but the Icelandic sagas completely bowled me over: Think spaghetti westerns with swords—only more thrilling. Except for the fact that it was written in the middle of the 20th century, Frans G. Bengtsson's magnificent book is essentially just such a saga, and if you love heroic literature, whether it be Njal Saga or Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy or Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan the Cimmerian, The Long Ships is the best end-of-summer treat you can possibly imagine.bearing in mind that my love for nearly all things even remotely icelandic undoubtedly clouds my judgment, i think dirda nails it. as the golden afternoons contract and it becomes necessary to snuggle beneath plaid things and take up tales of adventure, the strong-stomached among you should give orm & co a try; as david foster wallace noted in a childhood poem, they'll kill you very well.
(washington post book world columnist michael dirda, bn.com)
VICTOR: you know what? i was going to say that i couldn't send anna to its maker in good conscience, but i'm feeling bloodthirsty. the long ships is the most entertaining thing i've read all year. the count is down.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 have you ever been to a danish bar? did it suck?
02 in happier news of danes (news of happier danes?), are you the person who told me i should listen to the raveonettes? you were so right.
03 is it granted to the poets to drink from the largest horn at the banquet of the gods?
04 if you find yourself on the nerd spectrum, where are you?
05 has fall fallen where you are?
06 what's the most entertaining book you've read this year?
*previous battle here.
**i've read one.
***the southern provinces of sweden belonged to denmark in 980-1010; while bengtsson was a swedish novelist, i lump him in with the mean old danes.
****"[Töglag] was the latest and most difficult verse-form that the Icelandic poets had invented, and indeed his poem was so artfully contrived that little could be understood of its content. Everybody, however, listened with an appearance of understanding, for any man who could not understand poetry would be regarded as a poor specimen of a warrior; and King Harald praised the poem and gave the poet a gold ring. Toke plunged his head between his hands on the table and sighed disconsolately; this, he muttered, was real poetry, and he could see that he would never be able to succeed in writing the sort of verse that won gold rings."
04.19.11
101 in 1001 {II}: 024 get another tattoo [completed 03.29.11]
welcome to my life, tattoo! we've a long time together, me and you.
(should you find yourself in reykjavik in need of ink, sindri at íslenzka húðflúrstofan is a capital fellow.)
101 in 1001 {II}: 024 get another tattoo [completed 03.29.11]
welcome to my life, tattoo! we've a long time together, me and you.
(should you find yourself in reykjavik in need of ink, sindri at íslenzka húðflúrstofan is a capital fellow.)
04.15.11: now it can be told {the official iceland recap}
101 in 1001 {II}: 001 visit iceland [completed 03.24.11]
the sole JFK-to-keflavik flight lifts off each night at half past eight, touching down in iceland's snow-covered lava fields at just before half past six in the morning. if you're able to sleep for the five hours it takes to get across the atlantic, my hat's off to you; i had a vampire epic to read, northern lights to very nearly see, an indie band to try to identify,* and brennivin to drink,** so joe and i staggered out of the baggage area with a day and a half of wakefulness under our belts. i addressed this by wandering between a little cafe in the terminal (for strong coffee and skyr, stupendous icelandic yogurt which is to the thin, tasteless american stuff as crème fraîche is to tofu sour cream) and magnús tómasson's jet nest sculpture (in iceland jets hatch from eggs, of course). after three hours, the morning's first bus to the blue lagoon collected our remains from the cafe and shot us across the moonscape.
i realized, as cairns and rain swept past the windows, that i hadn't gone to iceland for any of the reasons i've been giving you for the past eight years; i went because i wanted to be awed. i wanted fine, baffling, alien things. seasoning our trip to the blue lagoon with sleep deprivation was probably overkill, but it worked like a charm. when i rejoined the morning on the lagoon deck, shivering and freshly traumatized by the nordic nudity i'd just left behind in the ladies' shower, i felt like a lucid dreamer. those pools deserve every bit of hype they get and then some; stepping into the blue lagoon, where your arm in front of your face is barely visible on a cold day, is a bit like walking out of your body.
you reenter it, of course; you stub your toes on the uneven silt beneath you, and you clench with giggles as grown men glide by you with faces full of geothermal mud (available in pots at the edges of the lagoon) like solemn slumber party crashers. you realize that just about everyone else is making out, for the blue lagoon is essentially a massive hot tub. you visit a craggy old steam cave unironically; you haunt the magnificent geothermal waterfall, where hot water pummels your back like a troll. (you refer to it that way: "i'm going to go back and get pummeled by a troll again.") you drink red wine, though your eyes keep crossing with fatigue and you're wearing a bathrobe and it's not yet eleven in the morning. you reach your swanky hotel looking a bit like a troll, as the minerals in your hair make it stand on end. you sleep the sleep of the dead.
we returned to life at dusk, which could be the perfect time to meet reykjavik; it's a city of thoughtfully-executed rooftops, and the sky sixty-six degrees above the equator takes its sweet time darkening into night. the streets are full of bears. the restaurants are small, twee, and almost universally excellent; we had our first real meal at an unassuming fish and chips restaurant near the harbor that ornamented its walls with a few smooth stones on the mantel, tucked a collection of handmade toys in the corner for diners with children, and offered us gluten-free biscotti with moss (nearly all food is slow food in reykjavik; it's easier to produce most things than it is to ship them over from mainland europe or the americas). we had our last meal there a week later.
reykjavik is a city for walking, and we were on our feet and aimless for most of the week; we'd anchor each day with a goal or two (on friday it was to bring sketches to my tattoo artist and crawl all over the local street art; on saturday it was to recover from the night in with duty-free rum via icelandic nachos and to try to trick joe into eating fermented shark at kolaportið, the celebrated weekend flea market). the latter was my goal, not his, sadly. i found a surplus russian navy jumper for like 3500 krónur, though, and that's better than watching your husband throw up hákarl anyway. well, probably. i know you won't believe me when i say that the nachos were fine, but verily, they were; the local understanding of corn chips left something to be desired, but the peppers were appropriately bitchy (they grow 'em feisty in england, too; well done, countries with largely bland food!) and the cheese probably involved skyr. as we ate said nachos joe started to remark on how very cute reykjavik was; he was interrupted by the passage of two small hairy ponies below the restaurant window, led by mini-halters along the city center sidewalk.
on monday we decided to take a proper spin around the coast.
mýrdalsjökull is the southernmost glacier in iceland, and its fourth largest (our guide was very interested in glacier rankings). the caldera beneath it, katla, last erupted in a magnificent way in 1918, which is why the land on the way to the solid ice is so lovecraftian (several ravens heckled us as our little band moved across the black rock; like bears, ravens were everywhere). the solid ice is receding quite rapidly, but that which remains is still formidable stuff; we clambered up its side, despite our guide's thin cries about crampons, and felt like ticks on the side of a massive sleeping thing. until we started to slip back down, that is, when we felt like americans who were going to disappear into mýrdalsjökull, "bing bang boom," as we'd been warned in a heavy lithuanian accent a few days earlier.*** mýrdalsjökull's glassy undersides wept effluent in little geode-caves all over the field.
from mýrdalsjökull we drove to vik and reynisfjara, a black sand beach beside reynisfjall. reynisfjall is iceland's version of northern ireland's giant's causeway, and reynisfjara is where i had my equivalent of joe's moment with the ponies at the icelandic mexican restaurant; as we pulled up to the beach, the sheepdogs at a farmstead a mile away spotted us and began leaping down the mountain. it was like a direct challenge to the antrim coast: "oh ireland, how charming it is that you have a finn mccool legend to pair with your good-looking hexagonal basalt rocks! snorri, RELEASE THE PUPPIES."
there are treasures and gold buried behind skógarfoss, our first waterfall of the day, as we learned from þórður tómasson, the ninety-year-old proprietor of the nearby folk museum. as his young german co-curator explained, þórður opened the museum because local farmers kept giving him old heirlooms and tools, and he wanted to preserve the memory of how icelanders lived for most of their history. he also clearly enjoyed performing before a crowd: he plucked away at a mysterious two-stringed instrument and sang for us when we arrived, he pulled out what looked like a couple of massive tops and showed us how to spin both wool and horse hair, and he played us out of the museum with a thumping rendition of "auld lang syne" on a creaking organ. the turf houses were also þórður's turf, if you will, as were the mysterious tiny houses and jawbones on the hillside beyond skógar. no treasure behind seljalandsfoss (the second waterfall), alas, but we were able to hike behind it; as you can see, it's heartbreakingly unattractive.
the brave little farm pictured between the two waterfalls stands at the foot of eyjafjallajökull - that is, the volcano that stranded poor cara and nye when they were to come out to new york this time last year. i was prepared to take a long hike and rough it up on their behalf, but our guide disarmed me by wandering off to speak with a man on a tractor and coming back to explain that he'd just spoken with the farmer: "it so happens that he is hauling ass from the volcano right now!" (icelanders pronounce sh as a hard ss.) "this is four hundred pounds of ass he has here, and he has done this since the volcano started spewing ass in the eruption. if you come here and feel some of this in the bucket, it is some of the finest ass in iceland."
i'd like to say that we rounded out our survey of natural wonders by seeing the northern lights - they were, after all, what i'd been most excited about seeing - but the balmy march weather had no interest in our yens. on sunday the sky was full of clouds and the tour was called off; on monday night we rolled out with a coach full of pimply american coeds and spent three hours crisscrossing southwestern iceland, stopping every five minutes or so when the spotter "suspected auroral activity." we drank weird crowberry liqueur on the sly as christian rock limped out of the stereo and the coeds turned restless and rude, and when we were finally invited to climb out of the coach and squint at what had seemed like a faint smear of light before a wall of rain swooshed across the highway, we were already too late (and half of the tour got lost at the side of the road). weather forced a cancellation again on our last night; no northern lights, unless you count the smear. i was disappointed, but i've decided to regard the failure as a last gift from iceland; i'd known almost immediately that i'd want to come back, and now i have no choice. our favorite concierge at the hotel maintained that we should come back for new year's eve: "we go crazy for fireworks," she said. "we're broke, but what we have we spend on fireworks." it does me good to know that you're out there, iceland.
{full photo set here.}
101 in 1001 {II}: 001 visit iceland [completed 03.24.11]
the sole JFK-to-keflavik flight lifts off each night at half past eight, touching down in iceland's snow-covered lava fields at just before half past six in the morning. if you're able to sleep for the five hours it takes to get across the atlantic, my hat's off to you; i had a vampire epic to read, northern lights to very nearly see, an indie band to try to identify,* and brennivin to drink,** so joe and i staggered out of the baggage area with a day and a half of wakefulness under our belts. i addressed this by wandering between a little cafe in the terminal (for strong coffee and skyr, stupendous icelandic yogurt which is to the thin, tasteless american stuff as crème fraîche is to tofu sour cream) and magnús tómasson's jet nest sculpture (in iceland jets hatch from eggs, of course). after three hours, the morning's first bus to the blue lagoon collected our remains from the cafe and shot us across the moonscape.
i realized, as cairns and rain swept past the windows, that i hadn't gone to iceland for any of the reasons i've been giving you for the past eight years; i went because i wanted to be awed. i wanted fine, baffling, alien things. seasoning our trip to the blue lagoon with sleep deprivation was probably overkill, but it worked like a charm. when i rejoined the morning on the lagoon deck, shivering and freshly traumatized by the nordic nudity i'd just left behind in the ladies' shower, i felt like a lucid dreamer. those pools deserve every bit of hype they get and then some; stepping into the blue lagoon, where your arm in front of your face is barely visible on a cold day, is a bit like walking out of your body.
you reenter it, of course; you stub your toes on the uneven silt beneath you, and you clench with giggles as grown men glide by you with faces full of geothermal mud (available in pots at the edges of the lagoon) like solemn slumber party crashers. you realize that just about everyone else is making out, for the blue lagoon is essentially a massive hot tub. you visit a craggy old steam cave unironically; you haunt the magnificent geothermal waterfall, where hot water pummels your back like a troll. (you refer to it that way: "i'm going to go back and get pummeled by a troll again.") you drink red wine, though your eyes keep crossing with fatigue and you're wearing a bathrobe and it's not yet eleven in the morning. you reach your swanky hotel looking a bit like a troll, as the minerals in your hair make it stand on end. you sleep the sleep of the dead.
we returned to life at dusk, which could be the perfect time to meet reykjavik; it's a city of thoughtfully-executed rooftops, and the sky sixty-six degrees above the equator takes its sweet time darkening into night. the streets are full of bears. the restaurants are small, twee, and almost universally excellent; we had our first real meal at an unassuming fish and chips restaurant near the harbor that ornamented its walls with a few smooth stones on the mantel, tucked a collection of handmade toys in the corner for diners with children, and offered us gluten-free biscotti with moss (nearly all food is slow food in reykjavik; it's easier to produce most things than it is to ship them over from mainland europe or the americas). we had our last meal there a week later.
reykjavik is a city for walking, and we were on our feet and aimless for most of the week; we'd anchor each day with a goal or two (on friday it was to bring sketches to my tattoo artist and crawl all over the local street art; on saturday it was to recover from the night in with duty-free rum via icelandic nachos and to try to trick joe into eating fermented shark at kolaportið, the celebrated weekend flea market). the latter was my goal, not his, sadly. i found a surplus russian navy jumper for like 3500 krónur, though, and that's better than watching your husband throw up hákarl anyway. well, probably. i know you won't believe me when i say that the nachos were fine, but verily, they were; the local understanding of corn chips left something to be desired, but the peppers were appropriately bitchy (they grow 'em feisty in england, too; well done, countries with largely bland food!) and the cheese probably involved skyr. as we ate said nachos joe started to remark on how very cute reykjavik was; he was interrupted by the passage of two small hairy ponies below the restaurant window, led by mini-halters along the city center sidewalk.
on monday we decided to take a proper spin around the coast.
mýrdalsjökull is the southernmost glacier in iceland, and its fourth largest (our guide was very interested in glacier rankings). the caldera beneath it, katla, last erupted in a magnificent way in 1918, which is why the land on the way to the solid ice is so lovecraftian (several ravens heckled us as our little band moved across the black rock; like bears, ravens were everywhere). the solid ice is receding quite rapidly, but that which remains is still formidable stuff; we clambered up its side, despite our guide's thin cries about crampons, and felt like ticks on the side of a massive sleeping thing. until we started to slip back down, that is, when we felt like americans who were going to disappear into mýrdalsjökull, "bing bang boom," as we'd been warned in a heavy lithuanian accent a few days earlier.*** mýrdalsjökull's glassy undersides wept effluent in little geode-caves all over the field.
from mýrdalsjökull we drove to vik and reynisfjara, a black sand beach beside reynisfjall. reynisfjall is iceland's version of northern ireland's giant's causeway, and reynisfjara is where i had my equivalent of joe's moment with the ponies at the icelandic mexican restaurant; as we pulled up to the beach, the sheepdogs at a farmstead a mile away spotted us and began leaping down the mountain. it was like a direct challenge to the antrim coast: "oh ireland, how charming it is that you have a finn mccool legend to pair with your good-looking hexagonal basalt rocks! snorri, RELEASE THE PUPPIES."
there are treasures and gold buried behind skógarfoss, our first waterfall of the day, as we learned from þórður tómasson, the ninety-year-old proprietor of the nearby folk museum. as his young german co-curator explained, þórður opened the museum because local farmers kept giving him old heirlooms and tools, and he wanted to preserve the memory of how icelanders lived for most of their history. he also clearly enjoyed performing before a crowd: he plucked away at a mysterious two-stringed instrument and sang for us when we arrived, he pulled out what looked like a couple of massive tops and showed us how to spin both wool and horse hair, and he played us out of the museum with a thumping rendition of "auld lang syne" on a creaking organ. the turf houses were also þórður's turf, if you will, as were the mysterious tiny houses and jawbones on the hillside beyond skógar. no treasure behind seljalandsfoss (the second waterfall), alas, but we were able to hike behind it; as you can see, it's heartbreakingly unattractive.
the brave little farm pictured between the two waterfalls stands at the foot of eyjafjallajökull - that is, the volcano that stranded poor cara and nye when they were to come out to new york this time last year. i was prepared to take a long hike and rough it up on their behalf, but our guide disarmed me by wandering off to speak with a man on a tractor and coming back to explain that he'd just spoken with the farmer: "it so happens that he is hauling ass from the volcano right now!" (icelanders pronounce sh as a hard ss.) "this is four hundred pounds of ass he has here, and he has done this since the volcano started spewing ass in the eruption. if you come here and feel some of this in the bucket, it is some of the finest ass in iceland."
i'd like to say that we rounded out our survey of natural wonders by seeing the northern lights - they were, after all, what i'd been most excited about seeing - but the balmy march weather had no interest in our yens. on sunday the sky was full of clouds and the tour was called off; on monday night we rolled out with a coach full of pimply american coeds and spent three hours crisscrossing southwestern iceland, stopping every five minutes or so when the spotter "suspected auroral activity." we drank weird crowberry liqueur on the sly as christian rock limped out of the stereo and the coeds turned restless and rude, and when we were finally invited to climb out of the coach and squint at what had seemed like a faint smear of light before a wall of rain swooshed across the highway, we were already too late (and half of the tour got lost at the side of the road). weather forced a cancellation again on our last night; no northern lights, unless you count the smear. i was disappointed, but i've decided to regard the failure as a last gift from iceland; i'd known almost immediately that i'd want to come back, and now i have no choice. our favorite concierge at the hotel maintained that we should come back for new year's eve: "we go crazy for fireworks," she said. "we're broke, but what we have we spend on fireworks." it does me good to know that you're out there, iceland.
{full photo set here.}
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 have you heard fm belfast? would you recognize them on a plane?
02 what's your dream destination? why do you want to go there?
03 could i convince you to eat fermented shark?
04 do you trust ravens?
05 do you think prometheus's liver grew back every day because it was eaten by an eagle every day, or was he just some sort of daily liver generator?
06 giants v. puppies: who will win?
07 so you're the proprietor of a museum. what do you exhibit?
08 so what about the tattoo, huh? wait, no, that's a question you'd ask me. the tattoo gets its own post.
*the lanky icelandic guy and sweet-faced girl sharing the awkward bank of seats in front of the exit door with me were on their way home from sxsw, according to the performer passes on their bags; he spent most of the flight composing on his laptop and fielding assorted CDs ("brian eno and david byrne!") from an older manager type who kept visiting them from the swankier saga class section at the front of the plane. turns out they were fm belfast.
**brennivin, incidentally, is tasty stuff, if you're the sort of person who likes herbal spirits and doesn't mind giving flight attendants the impression you're an alcoholic.
***Our Lithuanian Friend was amazing; we met her in an artists' collective in a basement on laugavegur and were pinned for an hour as she explained how to prevent alzheimer's (memorizing poetry, picking up additional languages, and taking shark oil), how to approach glaciers (never without GPS), why celebrities love iceland (because everyone's too polite to try to talk to them, though they do call their friends on their mobiles: "guess who is at next table? HA-reeson ford! he is eating SAL-mon!"), and why joe should start taking shark oil. (he did.)
04.07.11
The Office of Non-Iceland-Related Affairs, she browns my time and eats it on toast points with her pinky in the air. here's an itinerant reykjavik mitten, and a second installment of off-topic passages i've recently enjoyed (first installment here).
The Office of Non-Iceland-Related Affairs, she browns my time and eats it on toast points with her pinky in the air. here's an itinerant reykjavik mitten, and a second installment of off-topic passages i've recently enjoyed (first installment here).
Having the [harp seal] pup at their house changed the Sieswerdas permanently. Mrs. Sieswerda fed it a mixture of cottage cheese and cream supplied gratis by a local dairy. The seal ate five baby bottles full, five feedings a day. Paul Sieswerda did the disagreeable work of cleanup. (Seals are known for their carelessness about hygiene.) The pup spent much of his time in a kiddie pool in the Sieswerdas' back yard, where their two young children played with it. It had a starring role at one of their birthday parties. The children named it Cecil, and the family made up a rhyme that went, "Cecil, the seal, who came from the sea,/Lives at the Sieswerdas', just like me."
[...]
For people to react emotionally to an animal, it can't have little, piggy eyes, and seals don't. They are what environmentalists call "charismatic megafauna"; staring with big brown eyes into a camera lens proved to be a survival advantage for them.
(ian frazier in "back to the harbor," on how seals have returned to new york)
"He's writing his name in water," I said.
"What's that?"
It was the half-regretful term--borrowed from the headstone of John Keats--that Crabtree used to describe his own and others' failure to express a literary gift through any actual writing on paper. Some of them, he said, just told lies; others wove plots out of the gnarls and elf knots of their lives and then followed them through to resolution. That had always been Crabtree's chosen genre--thinking his way into an attractive disaster and then attempting to talk his way out, leaving no record and nothing to show for his efforts but a reckless reputation and a small dossier in the files of the Berkeley and New York City police departments.
[...]
Crabtree's snoring was loud enough to rattle the glass of water on the nightstand, to ruin his love affairs, to cause violent confrontations with neighbors in cheap motels. It was loud enough to kill bacteria and loosen centuries of dirt from the face of a cathedral.
(michael chabon in wonder boys*)
It's not so much a problem of Art—David Foster Wallace took himself out of the conversation about what David Foster Wallace wanted, after all—as a problem of craft. [DFW's posthumous unfinished novel] The Pale King is not a finished object. Reviewing it as a novel is like eating whatever was in a dead person's fridge and calling it a dinner party and comparing it to the dinner parties the deceased gave in the past.
(from tom scocca's slate post, "david foster wallace wrote two novels, and the pale king is not one of them," on michiko kakutani's new york times review)
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 would you foster a baby seal? where would you keep it? what would you name it?
02 are you charismatic megafauna?
03 are you writing your name in water? do you know anyone who is?**
04 if you snore, what could your snoring accomplish?
05 was it fair play for ol' michiko to review the pale king as a novel? is it fair play for ol' michiko to review the pale king at all?
06 where's the other mitten?
*the most chandleresque book i've picked up in months; bet carefully on its eventual THUNDERTOME appearance.
**i'd happily accuse myself, but i'm quite safe from having literary gifts; my undergraduate fiction class was a bloodbath.
04.06.11
laugavegur and hverfisgata are the reykjavik equivalent of mission and market in san francisco, after a fashion; laugavegur's traditionally regarded as the main drag, and hverfisgata (parallel and a block closer to the sea) and brooklyn (read: williamsburg) are often mentioned in the same breath. peering down blocks perpendicular to either street gives you a jaw-dropping view of faxaflói bay ("reykjavik" means "smoky bay"), and walking down those blocks and wandering around a bit is like being swallowed by a magnificent street-art whale. can we enact some sort of exchange program in which new york gets these guys and we give iceland jim joe and dickchicken? i'd fancy a lower east side or bedford avenue tributary covered with this.
laugavegur and hverfisgata are the reykjavik equivalent of mission and market in san francisco, after a fashion; laugavegur's traditionally regarded as the main drag, and hverfisgata (parallel and a block closer to the sea) and brooklyn (read: williamsburg) are often mentioned in the same breath. peering down blocks perpendicular to either street gives you a jaw-dropping view of faxaflói bay ("reykjavik" means "smoky bay"), and walking down those blocks and wandering around a bit is like being swallowed by a magnificent street-art whale. can we enact some sort of exchange program in which new york gets these guys and we give iceland jim joe and dickchicken? i'd fancy a lower east side or bedford avenue tributary covered with this.
04.05.11
i have reached a point in my life at which i no longer feel that i need to find the cheapest accommodation possible. i got my fill of big-city hostels full of snoring germans in my twenties, son; i don't need personal attendants or a levitating bed, but i work hard to find good deals on appealing digs (cf. our private patio at the ace in palm springs, hotel st. paul in montreal) and then save for them. or save after them. pennies are pinched at some point. i happened upon an exceedingly fine rate at reykjavik's hotel borg - a restored art deco joint which hosted both the king of norway and marlene dietrich, presumably on separate lines of the guestbook though one never knows, now does one - and that is where we rested our heads.
appealing digs are also terribly handy when one decides to skip the superexpensive rúntur (a television tuned to some log-splitting contest beckoned to us from a bar on the way home friday night - i am all for log-splitting contests - but shouty late-night weekend pub crawls do not blow our hair back), don a hotel bathrobe, and tuck into one's aged guatemalan rum (thanks, duty-free!). i am perfectly comfortable being the guy who flies to the arctic circle and stays in with "easy lover."
i have reached a point in my life at which i no longer feel that i need to find the cheapest accommodation possible. i got my fill of big-city hostels full of snoring germans in my twenties, son; i don't need personal attendants or a levitating bed, but i work hard to find good deals on appealing digs (cf. our private patio at the ace in palm springs, hotel st. paul in montreal) and then save for them. or save after them. pennies are pinched at some point. i happened upon an exceedingly fine rate at reykjavik's hotel borg - a restored art deco joint which hosted both the king of norway and marlene dietrich, presumably on separate lines of the guestbook though one never knows, now does one - and that is where we rested our heads.
appealing digs are also terribly handy when one decides to skip the superexpensive rúntur (a television tuned to some log-splitting contest beckoned to us from a bar on the way home friday night - i am all for log-splitting contests - but shouty late-night weekend pub crawls do not blow our hair back), don a hotel bathrobe, and tuck into one's aged guatemalan rum (thanks, duty-free!). i am perfectly comfortable being the guy who flies to the arctic circle and stays in with "easy lover."
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 do you think the fates have woven a night in a youth hostel into your future at some point, or are you at the end of that thread?
02 what is with those germans?
03 your most expensive hotel room ever: what was the damage? (not you, johnny depp.)
04 pub crawls: yea or nay?
05 did any of you believe those were my feet up there?
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