tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66727712878854313812024-03-05T10:42:09.999-08:00AnfenwickAnfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.comBlogger128125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-74209664969499583722018-03-11T01:36:00.000-08:002018-03-11T01:36:21.226-08:00Borders: The Labors of Hadrian<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvgidunB4rKsZOkD82eA694Mxvbj3prpTSvHY1uzRZMjMAa2LVVZ3oSqt5GY-ZKEfC3XimkFqI_rWicvALFB72_cDl6hOw1PfygpY2YkRlk527rLYSE2a8jEmtqLI_CPL6uNaQR1EhEZsq/s1600/Milecastle_39_on_Hadrian%2527s_Wall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvgidunB4rKsZOkD82eA694Mxvbj3prpTSvHY1uzRZMjMAa2LVVZ3oSqt5GY-ZKEfC3XimkFqI_rWicvALFB72_cDl6hOw1PfygpY2YkRlk527rLYSE2a8jEmtqLI_CPL6uNaQR1EhEZsq/s400/Milecastle_39_on_Hadrian%2527s_Wall.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/By%20Adam%20Cuerden%20-%20Photograph%20by%20uploader,%20Public%20Domain,%20https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2326028" target="_blank">From Wikipedia</a>: Milecastle 39 on Hadrian's Wall</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Hadrian's Wall was once the border between Roman Britain and 'the rest', and is now subsumed into England. From a British perspective, it might feel as though the Roman Emperor was bestowing special attention on us. In fact, <a href="http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Historia_Augusta/Hadrian/1*.html#note83" target="_blank">as this passage shows*</a>, maintaining borders all over the Roman Empire was pretty much his life's work:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Emperor Augustus had set the natural boundaries of the Roman Empire as being the Rhine, the Danube and the Euphrates. This policy had been abandoned by Trajan in his conquests of Dacia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Assyria. </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>On taking possession of the imperial power Hadrian at once resumed the policy of the early emperors, and devoted his attention to maintaining peace throughout the world, for the nations which Trajan had conquered began to revolt; the Moors, moreover, began to make attacks, and the Sarmatians to wage war, the Britons could not be kept under Roman sway, Egypt was thrown into disorder by riots, and finally Libya and Palestine showed the spirit of rebellion. Whereupon he relinquished all conquests east of the Euphrates and the Tigris, following, as he used to say, the example of Cato, who urged that the Macedonians, because they could not be held as subjects, should be declared free and independent. </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>After stabilising his imperial status in Rome, Hadrian travelled to the provinces of Gaul, and came to the relief of all the communities with various acts of generosity; and from there he went over into Germany to examine the state of the military.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Having reformed the army quite in the manner of a monarch, he set out for Britain, and there he corrected many abuses and was the first to construct a wall, eighty miles in length, which was to separate the barbarians from the Romans. </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>This fortification extended from Wallsend at the mouth of the Tyne to Bowness on the Firth of Solway, a distance of 73.5 English miles. Its remains show that it consisted of two lines of embankment with a moat between them, and a stone wall running parallel on the north. In the space between the embankment and the wall were small strongholds about a mile apart with an occasional larger stronghold, all connected by a military road. </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>After arranging matter in Britain Hadrian crossed over to Gaul, for he was rendered anxious by the news of a riot in Alexandria, which arose on account of a living manifestation of the bull god Apis. After this he travelled to Spain where he restored a temple to Augustus and extracted a levy from the natives and the Italian settlers who were previously exempt.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>During this period and on many other occasions also, in many regions where the barbarians are held back not by rivers but by artificial barriers, Hadrian shut them off by means of high stakes planted deep in the ground and fastened together in the manner of a palisade. </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Just such a palisade has been found on the German frontier where the rivers Main and Neckar do not constitute a natural boundary. He appointed a king for the Germans, suppressed revolts among the Moors, and won from the senate the usual ceremonies of thanksgiving. The war with the Parthians had not at that time advanced beyond the preparatory stage, and Hadrian checked it with a personal conference.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>After this Hadrian travelled by way of Asia and the islands to Greece, and, following the example of Hercules and Philip, had himself initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. He bestowed many favors on the Athenians and sat as president of the public games. And during this stay in Greece care was taken, they say, that when Hadrian was present, none should come to a sacrifice armed, whereas, as a rule, many carried knives. </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Afterwards he sailed to Sicily, and there he climbed Mount Aetna to see the sunrise, which is many-hued, they say, like the rainbow. Thence he returned to Rome, and from there he crossed over to Africa, where he showed many acts of kindness to the provinces. Hardly any emperor every travelled with such speed over so much territory.</i></blockquote>
* The post above quotes <a href="http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Historia_Augusta/Hadrian/1*.html#note83" target="_blank">the linked text</a>, but combines information from the footnotes with selected passages from the translation of the Life of Hadrian to present a coherent account of his work on border maintenance.Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-52619372016809383292018-03-11T00:57:00.001-08:002018-03-11T00:59:24.599-08:00Borders: The Slash in the Trees<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEzVqnR-jr9nAzsKp1RdyDs1GVG08APxq7kSFT61rNPCeP1IeDJwTnDtR8XAEDUuX_X0FN-q6JHCs-SazK6Uw2rzd0kQ7tzwQKBzWu-gs8DtEGA3mMVPZmsu_rUhd3Hzk-Y9ijFUlT3472/s1600/Canadian+border.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="879" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEzVqnR-jr9nAzsKp1RdyDs1GVG08APxq7kSFT61rNPCeP1IeDJwTnDtR8XAEDUuX_X0FN-q6JHCs-SazK6Uw2rzd0kQ7tzwQKBzWu-gs8DtEGA3mMVPZmsu_rUhd3Hzk-Y9ijFUlT3472/s400/Canadian+border.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The 'slash in the trees' and a Canadian border post, a few miles west of the eastern railway crossing.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Lately, the US-Canada border has been in the UK news, touted by the Prime Minister as a possible model for the post-Brexit Irish border. <a href="https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/why-is-there-a-slash-in-the-trees-at-the-us-canada-border/Content?oid=2266575" target="_blank">Someone ought to share this with her:</a><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Perhaps you thought the border between the United States and Canada was thoroughly invisible boundary line, something as theoretical and imaginary as the cordon between the Eastern and Central Standard time zones. Well, you would be wrong.</i></blockquote>
I already knew this, since I'm planning to cross the border by train this summer. I know I need to send Amtrak a copy of my passport number well in advance, and also that the border adds a couple of hours to an already very slow journey.<br />
<br />
With Google Maps you can see border posts and even concrete bollards blocking what should be minor residential roads. But that's not all. Much of the US-Canadian border runs through water or forest. Through the latter, there is a 20-foot wide corridor carved through the trees for 1349 miles. US and Canada share the task of keeping this line free of trees, in a monumental 15-year cycle of bush clearance.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Lest visitors think the 20-foot-wide endless lane they just discovered in the northern woods is some kind of installation art or strange land-management practice, the IBC has placed 8000 monuments and reference points along it indicating the international border.</i></blockquote>
It's easy to see why people might be confused otherwise.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"The purpose," Hipsley (then Acting Commissioner of the US International Boundary Commission) explained genially, "is so the average person... knows they are on the border."</i></blockquote>
And the reason you would want to know that?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"If you cross it and are caught, whether you intended to or not, you can be fined a substantial amount - so it's important," Hipsley warned.</i></blockquote>
Actually, Hipsley is really good at telling it like it is. Here he explains the all-important relationship between borders and regulatory divergence. Brexiters (forced or voluntary), take note!<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"It's still important, because we [the U.S. and Canada] have different governments with different policies on farming and timber management."</i></blockquote>
Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-11803379124874969082018-03-06T08:32:00.000-08:002018-03-06T08:32:33.706-08:00Borders: José Saramago Sermon to the Fishes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirbjOSLIsqjP7I6tnXbt8cm8073JOPuVF8o0_jCfCQiHOadysJppNJlTna1YM1dIMp2AlY-6Pk862Si8u9_pjEJ-bpuPa7Mp3YSw2uh4gxkUyIyA6BeNQEzB-XjTBvtFVWr0Bo5nGkFA9g/s1600/Journey+to+Portugal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="474" data-original-width="303" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirbjOSLIsqjP7I6tnXbt8cm8073JOPuVF8o0_jCfCQiHOadysJppNJlTna1YM1dIMp2AlY-6Pk862Si8u9_pjEJ-bpuPa7Mp3YSw2uh4gxkUyIyA6BeNQEzB-XjTBvtFVWr0Bo5nGkFA9g/s320/Journey+to+Portugal.jpg" width="204" /></a></div>
In 1981, Portuguese author José Saramago published <i>Journey to Portugal</i>, a thorough exploration of his home country. Nowhere does he display more <i>faux </i>bewilderment than at its borders, with their history of incomprehensible skirmishes, their land owners who answer to both Portuguese and Spanish administrations, their workers to whom the border represented a living and those others to whom it represented an obstacle on the way to work, their citizens - and fish - with undefinable national identities.<br />
<br />
In this repeated stumbling against the paradoxical border, Saramago continually re-opens the question of whether his project of even makes sense. Five years later, Portugal joined the EEC. In 1995 it joined the Schengen area and the borders started to come down. <i>Journey to Portugal</i>'s opening passages, in which Saramago ceremoniously re-enters the Portuguese nation at its north-eastern border, form an amusing memorial to something that should remain a memory.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"Nothing of the kind had occurred within the living memory of any border guard. This was the first traveller ever to pull up in his car, with the engine already in Portugal but the petrol tank still in Spain, and lean over the parapet at the precise point crossed by the invisible line of the frontier. Then, from across the deep dark waters, echoing between the tall rocky slopes on either side, the traveller’s voice could be heard preaching to the fish in the river.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>‘Gather round, fishes, those of you to the right still in the River Douro and those of you to the left in the River Duero, come closer all of you and advise me which language you speak when you cross the watery frontiers beneath, and whether down there you also produce passports and visas as you enter and depart. Here am I, gazing down on you from this high barrier, as you gaze back up at me, fishes residing in these mingling waters, and who can as easily find yourselves on one shoreline as on another, a grand fraternity of fishes who only devour one another for reasons of hunger and never on a patriotic impulse. Grant me, O fishes, clear instruction, lest I forget this lesson on the second stage of my journey into Portugal: may I learn in passing from one land to the next to pay the closest attention to the similarities and differences, whilst not forgetting something in common to both humans and fishes alike, namely that a traveller has preferences and sympathies unconstrained by the obligations of universal love, never hitherto required of him. To you, then, I at length bid farewell, O fishes, until a future day: may you follow your own course out of the sight of fishermen. Swim joyfully on, and wish me a safe journey. Farewell, farewell.’</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>This was a fine miracle with which to start the journey. A sudden breeze ruffled the waters, or perhaps it was simply the disturbance caused by the submerging fish, for no sooner had the traveller fallen silent than there was nothing to be seen apart from the river and its shores, and nothing to be heard above the dozy hum of the car engine."</i></blockquote>
Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-43411922372462065642018-03-06T08:06:00.000-08:002018-03-06T08:06:37.962-08:00Borders: The Rule of the Land by Garrett Carr<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQgFTogEM9xdCyju2s-JWfw_oZYgAGMJX29PZBMHZDOXJYlbTra4yimbA_-ERNHiGSdKcIDNupu7r5YdHye9-RtH-_0E2tm7ld6ULAkhIZXvBFw9SaUDAN0eV10N5t939SQur_lESyDErn/s1600/The+Rule+of+the+Land.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="325" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQgFTogEM9xdCyju2s-JWfw_oZYgAGMJX29PZBMHZDOXJYlbTra4yimbA_-ERNHiGSdKcIDNupu7r5YdHye9-RtH-_0E2tm7ld6ULAkhIZXvBFw9SaUDAN0eV10N5t939SQur_lESyDErn/s320/The+Rule+of+the+Land.jpg" width="208" /></a></div>
I spent my teenage years with the bitter strife and regular outbursts of violence along the Irish border as background noise on the news, while occasional terrorist attacks struck nearer to home. Had these things receded into a semi-legendary past in the minds of the UK's voters? At any rate, Garrett Carr's <i>The Rule of the Land</i> introduces itself as follows:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"In the wake of the EU referendum, the United Kingdom's border with Ireland has gained greater significance: it is set to become the frontier with the European Union.</i><br />
<i>To uncover its secret landscape, with a troubled past and an uncertain future, Garrett Carr travelled Ireland's border on foot and by canoe. This invisible line has hosted smugglers and kings, runaways, peacemakers, protesters and terrorists, revealing the tumult of a border, changing the way we look at nationhood, land and power."</i></blockquote>
Carr's <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/05/irish-border-brexiters-good-friday-agreement" target="_blank">promotion of his book in the Guardian</a> makes for interesting reading as he describes the border today:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"The line [of the Irish border] itself is invisible, although usually following a feature, often a hedgerow or stream. I found many unofficial crossing places, wooden footbridges and new paths, and I felt north and south were getting to know each other again. There were also major road bridges that were so fresh they weren't yet on Ordnance Survey maps. "For years and years I lived in a cul-de-sac," a woman told me at her front gate, "but the new bridge was put up and I can go either way now." The Good Friday agreement is 20 years old, and the bridge across the Blackwater river, only a few hundred feet from her house, was then eight years old. She could remember when it was opened. "It was bizarre really," she said, "I'd dander over and meet people I hadn't seen in years." Ireland's border has been associated with crime, be it smuggling or terrorism. I can report my most dangerous encounter was with a goat."</i></blockquote>
Thanks to the EU, the activity once criminalized as 'smuggling' had become perfectly legal commerce and the incitement to terrorism had been removed. In a single, brilliant paragraph, Carr sums up the freedom from personal and community-based identity provided by the EU umbrella.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"You did not have to pick one of two sides any more. Most people moved towards areas of consensus, the value of peace and an open border. "Sure there is no border any more," one farmer told me. Strictly speaking this was untrue, and he was actually pointing towards the border at the time, where it ran with a river along the bottom of his field, but it was true enough that he could make the claim with confidence. The border is not there is your identity prefers it absent. on the other hand, if your identity depends on the border, then it is there for you." </i></blockquote>
Now, the Republic of Ireland and the Northern Irish region of the UK are presented with an impossible conundrum: the border which MUST exist and which MUST, at the same time, be intangible and invisible. As <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/05/theresa-may-brexit-five-laws-of-maybotics-northern-ireland-border" target="_blank">John Crace, also in the Guardian said</a>, jokingly, yet with almost inevitable accuracy:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"So it took Yvette Cooper to get forensic by pointing out that the prime minister's solution of the Northern Irish border had been to propose that 80% of traffic should be allowed to get away with smuggling cows, pigs, grenades and guns."</i></blockquote>
Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-76571212947339926082016-12-30T07:07:00.000-08:002016-12-30T07:07:26.836-08:00Our daughter is over 15 and we just got the formalities for her birth completed!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl2CKM9hXN43UsnRzRGFvwJrWyWYtNXMVKV-DnHRh0IowdWnA8OvMcv82iLzWIzLQt_EJ1fBKUbbr6W7EijzT5Yq8RfnRDRmYQ-SePCIUG0DJseQxMbOk4Y34_1J6ztgTcYsc_CUUyW0tj/s1600/Princess_Truella_on_a_stork_-_Project_Gutenberg_eText_16529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl2CKM9hXN43UsnRzRGFvwJrWyWYtNXMVKV-DnHRh0IowdWnA8OvMcv82iLzWIzLQt_EJ1fBKUbbr6W7EijzT5Yq8RfnRDRmYQ-SePCIUG0DJseQxMbOk4Y34_1J6ztgTcYsc_CUUyW0tj/s320/Princess_Truella_on_a_stork_-_Project_Gutenberg_eText_16529.jpg" width="254" /></a></div>
I love the way the title of this post sounds like a tabloid headline. Unfortunately, the little story it contains may seem long and tedious in parts, so please remember that it represents a routine type of occurrence in the international lifestyle. And yes, it is long and tedious.<br />
<br />
When we got married, in a small village in the French mountains, we were still British and American respectively, and not French as well. On that occasion, we were presented with a little booklet known as the 'Livret de Famille'. The French state came up with the idea of a Livret de Famille in 1871 because it had just lost a whole bunch of important documents in a fire. Lots of people found themselves with no proof of their marriages or the births of their children and like anyone else who belatedly realizes the importance of backups, the state decided it would be a good idea to distribute copies of the evidence around the place, specifically to the most interested parties. It was such a good idea, in fact, that a penalty was imposed for not keeping the Livret de Famille up to date.<br />
<br />
Ours therefore repeated the information from our own birth certificates, confirmed our marriage, and provided more than twenty blank entries for the purpose of recording the births and deaths of the fruits of our unions. Such was life was back in 1871.<br />
<br />
In due course, the traditional stork arrived bearing a little bundle, not to the little French village, but to a pleasant suburb of London, for reasons I may explain some other time. The bundle received a British birth certificate and we figured it would be soon enough to get the Livret de Famille filled in when we got back to our village three months later. The Americans, we thought, could safely be allowed to wait even longer. Maybe I'll tell you about them some other time as well.<br />
<br />
The trouble started when we got back to the village. The mairie said they could only fill in the Livret de Famille for children who were born locally. If a child was born in London, it was the job of the French Consulate to fill it in. The French Consulate said, reasonably enough, that they could only fill in the Livret de Famille for children of French nationality who had been born in London. Nobody, it seemed, was willing to fill in the entry that had to be filled in under pain of sanctions. We let it go, even though we suspected it would come back to haunt us. When we tried again, some years later, after we had all became French, the French Consulate of London admitted that it really only recorded the births of French children born in London who had been French at the time of their birth.<br />
<br />
There is some justice in the fact that they were the ones who had to deal with us when the haunting began five years later. We were in London again for a while and had taken our daughter out of school for half a day to try to renew her French passport. The first one had been issued by a nice chap in the district office near our village, who said she should be in the Livret de Famille really, but he could see our difficulty. Now, the French Consulate began to see our difficulty also. They couldn't possibly issue a passport to a child who wasn't in her parents' Livret de Famille. They couldn't possibly write her into the Livret de Famille . They couldn't possibly argue that she couldn't have a passport. Perhaps we should fill in an application to get them to put her in the Livret de Famille and see what happened.<br />
<br />
What happened is that a few weeks later, they sent the application back, assuring us that they still couldn't put her in the Livret de Famille but perhaps if we sent the application to France's 'Home Office' in Nantes? We figured out a way to buy French postage for the return envelope while living in the UK and sent our paperwork off to Nantes. Two months later, I called them up to see how they were getting on.<br />
<br />
In the first place, the office in Nantes assured me that they never had anything to do with filling in Livrets de Famille. At that point I <i>insisted</i>, which is a verb describing the usual approach of a French citizen who hopes to get somewhere in their relations with the administration. Recognizing the ploy, the person on the other end of the phone admitted that writing our daughter's name in the Livret de Famille might conceivably be their job. Of course, a few months later, they send our paperwork back on a technicality, and we sent it back to them, which is why nearly a year has gone by since we first tried to renew my daughter's passport. It's almost exactly fifteen years since we first tried to fulfill our administrative duties with respect to the French state.<br />
<br />
Our daughter's entry in the Livret de Famille is a pretty mundane thing in ordinary black pen, with a nearly invisible stamp. Need I emphasize that the temptation to do the obvious occurred to us quite regularly over the last fifteen years?<br />
<br />
Oh well, now we just have to go through the rigmarole of applying for a passport all over again.Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-86208586496900350982016-12-22T00:45:00.002-08:002016-12-30T07:08:19.898-08:00Lala Land<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXlqCY5mPifW1TVjcUOL-3V8PoClxmQ6V8SYvkQ8ptcKEUjoqSlcZgLCcJqrVMkSfWS3pqtD8MoAqv1mtrLPjlAYYMb0sSXCNEPBOQpS0aUkNAb0-TXDR0Kj3dGzbY9Jz2K3GLBeu0B2f3/s1600/20161222_072854.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXlqCY5mPifW1TVjcUOL-3V8PoClxmQ6V8SYvkQ8ptcKEUjoqSlcZgLCcJqrVMkSfWS3pqtD8MoAqv1mtrLPjlAYYMb0sSXCNEPBOQpS0aUkNAb0-TXDR0Kj3dGzbY9Jz2K3GLBeu0B2f3/s400/20161222_072854.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<span id="goog_1026477662"></span><span id="goog_1026477663"></span><br />
This is where we are - Lala Land, Helsinki. We like Helsinki: it's cold, the food is good, the hotel is great and there was a Crocs shop. Now we have to go, so I'll explain about how we didn't really escape the Brexiters in a bit.<br />
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******</div>
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So the barman in the hotel in Helsinki is from a little village in Kent, but he's been living in Finland for 9 years. He turned out to be a perfect example of the obliviousness people can display to the way their lives are shaped and supported by institutional underpinnings.<br />
<br />
Our barman is a Brexit supporter. We found this out because we started off commiserating with him on the grounds that he was surely going to have to start Finnish residence or citizenship proceedings. He said he wasn't going to do that and doubted he could pass the language test anyway. Well yeah, Finnish has a reputation! So we asked him if he was going back to Kent and he said, oh, no, he was staying right where he was. It's not like they were going to kick anyone out of Finland, really they weren't.<br />
<br />
Huh? They might not send the deportation van round on the day Britain formally leaves the EU. They don't need to. Let's just start with what we all know: this man has an employment contract that depends on him being an EU citizen. If nobody does anything, his employment contract will become.... 'non-legal' the day Britain leaves the EU. Perhaps his boss, who knows him, will not want to fire him. Perhaps the Finnish government, despite no doubt having better things to do, will pass a law saying that existing contracts with British citizens are valid. What then? Not many people stay in the same job for ever these days: those contracts might be good right up until the moment he wants to change jobs or gets fired. Or promoted, even. At that point, without some sort of Finnish immigration proceedings, there is no reason to suppose he will be able to enter into a new contract. There would be nothing to distinguish him from someone who arrived from Britain a few days ago, and the whole point of Britain leaving the EU is to curtail the freedom of movement of people. The movement of Eastern Europeans to Britain principally, but by the inevitable law of reciprocity, people like him. If Finland wants Britons like him, they will have to create a whole new administrative underpinning form them, or assimilate them into the immigration systems they already use for non-EU citizens.<br />
<br />
What would happen otherwise, they day he decides to go and visit his dear old mother in Kent? When he tries to return 'home' to Finland, he will have to go through immigration as an 'Outsider'. 'How long are you staying?' 'Oh, I live and work here,' will not be an acceptable way for that conversation with border control to go. Without a work permit, there will be nothing to distinguish him, a person who exercised <i>bona fide</i> treaty rights, from a Briton who has no expectation of entitlement to live and work in Finland.<br />
<br />
Even worse, all over Europe, all those databases which are programmed to treat the nationality code 'GB' as 'One Of Us' will flip over to 'Treat As Outsider'. Without some form of immigration proceeding, this can affect Britons in Europe in every part of their administrative lives: health, social security, education, legal rights, and in a way that is often completely automated and gives them no recourse through interaction with a human being.<br />
<br />
It is true that few politicians, in Britain or the rest of the EU, want this outcome. It is also true that they are going to have to do time-consuming political and institutional work to save the rights of a greater or lesser number of people, depending on the state. Britain has proposed sorting out the issue of Europeans in Britain and Britons in Europe early in its departure negotiations. It is easy for Britain to propose this, because immigration to Britain falls within their jurisdiction. In the past, the EU has not had much to do with immigration policy of non-EU citizens in the member states. It is not clear to me that they have any standing to negotiate on this topic. It might be up to each member state individually to decide what provisions they want to make for Britons. We don't know yet.<br />
<br />
Whether the EU decides collectively or the member states decide individually, it's almost certain that the most Britons in Europe (or Europeans in Britain) can expect is form of accelerated, and possibly easier than usual immigration procedure. Whether they will waive their usual language or culture test, their fees, or any of their administrative red tape is a moot point. Most of us are not counting on it. It seems quite possible to suppose that they will take the opportunity to repatriate anyone who has a criminal record, looks insolvent, or has failed to learn the local language after nine years. We consider that so likely that as we parted we automatically wished our barman luck in getting to grips with Finnish at last.Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-11658212646017771352016-12-21T02:43:00.000-08:002016-12-30T07:08:54.701-08:00Operation Escape Christmas<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitkkfNV6ATNnbnV3kDd1zO-AvcotmUb-zRGOocoGKI5sdv1Jz8F0URdFAscDe61FyaMrDNDdCbjluXTwNZEV1kmOcRXVvckDr0UXOimQE0CFgIMSDcKJbvpq70I9ubnTw8FOcSTvS2kObK/s1600/UKGrinch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitkkfNV6ATNnbnV3kDd1zO-AvcotmUb-zRGOocoGKI5sdv1Jz8F0URdFAscDe61FyaMrDNDdCbjluXTwNZEV1kmOcRXVvckDr0UXOimQE0CFgIMSDcKJbvpq70I9ubnTw8FOcSTvS2kObK/s320/UKGrinch.jpg" width="270" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Brexit Grinch <br />
Ruins your life, not just your Christmas 😢</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Hi y'all. This is going to be one of those live-blogging thingies.<br />
<br />
When all your Christmas presents for the foreseeable future consist of packets of paperwork, expense, bureaucracy and uncertainty as you struggle to save some shreds of the rights you cared about and had based your life around, (thank you, Brexit Grinch), it puts you right out of the mood. Consequently, we are attempting an escape to Finland. What Christmas is really about is Midwinter, so where better to go than the Arctic Circle (nearly).<br />
<br />
There are no guarantees of success here, what with strikes, winter weather, technical problems on the London Underground, human error, etc, etc. Let's see how this goes.<br />
<br />
<b>Booking a trip:</b> ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐<br />
Darned expensive, but since I often organize our trips myself, I have some insight into what I'm paying for. They made it easy.<br />
<br />
<b>Compulsory holiday insurance: </b>⭐⭐✩✩✩<br />
I wouldn't trust these clowns to fork out a cent, but at least they didn't charge us much either.<br />
<br />
<b>Procedure for obtaining a child's leave of absence for the last half day of term:</b> ✩✩✩✩✩<br />
I followed the application instructions, submitted a request over a month in advance and received no response, so I assumed there was no problem. That's how it's always been in the past. In the middle of the afternoon the day before our departure, I received a letter saying the request was refused! WTF!!! If they told me even one week ago, I could have arranged a car pickup from the school. Too late now. I emailed them to tell them it was no longer possible to adapt our plans and requested an explanation. But I already know what the explanation is. This is just the kind of efficiency and regard for the impact of decisions that Brexit Britain is teaching us to expect.<br />
<br />
<b>Success in getting across London to Heathrow: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐</b><br />
Clockwork. One hour and a half of clockwork. Go TFL!<br />
<br />
<b>The Heathrow airport 'experience': ⭐⭐⭐⭐✩</b><br />
Yeah, right? Actually, I like airports, though not as much as train stations. Security was security with no extra badness, just a little light exhibitionism. Come to think of it, I don't like T3 that much. Are there really so many people who like perfume? So we went to the pub, got seats, got beer....<br />
<br />
<b>The flight actually succeeds in leaving London: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐</b><br />
I think it was 10 minutes late, but it arrived early so who cares.<br />
<br />
<b>The Finnair 'experience': ⭐✩✩✩✩</b><br />
God, but flying is just the suckiesr form of transport. It would be bad enough without turbulence, but there was turbulence. Also the food. We did not expect much, but since we paid 10 GBP per meal, I thought it would be at least as good as when the food was free. Instead, it was so spectacularly bad it was almost a work of art in its own right. Next time we come to Helsinki (next summer) we plan to do by train and boat. Never mind if it takes a week.<br />
<br />
<b>The flight actually succeeds in reaching Helsinki: ⭐⭐⭐⭐✩</b><br />
Because it wouldn't really count as an escape if it didn't. As mentioned above, it was early, but it loses one star because the passengers shouldn't reaaly feel that relieved.<br />
<br />
<br />Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-51802659800391182102016-03-30T14:06:00.000-07:002016-03-30T14:06:33.870-07:00A Last-Minute Candidate for the Republican Nomination???He's just about par for the course. VOTE NOW for TOAD of TOAD HALL!!!<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0_fkjgU0g_x_WboO3P9t0pUAFlm_D0FYdKcKDhLdN1n29ij1oytaHlw1cwIwGix-LncEmZe_J6g75mgSyg7ugWp5twaa3f0UrbLYisGDPuBeVQ8ys8eCagig0tL1v0a8sW86ywuhoJyKA/s1600/Toad.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0_fkjgU0g_x_WboO3P9t0pUAFlm_D0FYdKcKDhLdN1n29ij1oytaHlw1cwIwGix-LncEmZe_J6g75mgSyg7ugWp5twaa3f0UrbLYisGDPuBeVQ8ys8eCagig0tL1v0a8sW86ywuhoJyKA/s1600/Toad.JPG" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
The world has held great Heroes,</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
As history-books have showed;</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
But never a name to go down in fame</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Compared with that of Toad!</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
The clever men at Harvard</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Know all that there is to be knowed.</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
But they none of them know one half as much</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
As intelligent Mr Toad!</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
The animals sat in the Ark and cried,</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Their tears in torrents flowed.</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Who said, 'Praise God! There's land ahead'?</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Encouraging Mr Toad!</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
The army all saluted</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
As they marched along the road</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Was if for Lincoln? Or Washington?</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
No. It was for Mr Toad!</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
A hot model and her girlfriends</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Sat at the window and posed.</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
She cried, 'Look! who's that handsome man?</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
They answered, 'Mr Toad'.*</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>*From Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows (slightly Americanized)</i></div>
Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-5983948134479417802016-03-29T05:25:00.002-07:002016-03-29T05:25:49.201-07:00It's all about Seif Eldin MustafaGiven the amount of news made these days by Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists, it's no wonder that when a plane gets hijacked by a guy who happens to be Muslim, diverted from its proper course, and forced to land in Cyprus instead of Egypt, the authorities are quick to assure us that this time it's for personal reasons. But is Seif Eldin Mustafa's action really so different from that of a fundamentalist?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>It's all about a woman.</i></blockquote>
...said Nikos Anastasiades, President of Cyprus, referring to the hijacker's wife who has apparently left him and moved to Cyprus.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
Nope, not really. If you're correct about his motives, it would seem to be all about a man, Seif Eldin Mustafa, yet another self-centered, half-witted fool who can't seem to get it through his skull that other people are autonomous beings with their own lives and thoughts, not his lifestyle accessories, and that sometimes, damn it, life just doesn't roll your way.</div>
<br />
Thought you were going on a business trip from Alexandria to Cairo? Not any more, because Seif Eldin Mustafa's wife has left him. On your way back home from a holiday? Nope, you're off to Cyprus to be used as a bartering tool in Seif Eldin Mustafa's attempt to recover his sexual property. <br />
<br />
** Apparently, it's ended well. Eventually, we might find out if Mustafa really is as confused as he seems about boundaries **<br />
<br />
And in the meantime here's a little something from my favorite Norwegian band. <br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-YmIyen47cs" width="420"></iframe>
Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-84308506704687900312016-03-28T09:13:00.000-07:002016-03-28T09:13:59.151-07:00Poor Londoner's Gumbo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3EfbQjxNaO99YjA3DsLtIKZGEbOjlN1ddnjEbWE-43-1jkTScD4PvlmB1UpXg9rf4fx4fVeViBhqBrt7w1Gi84gKxKYhweadOO4bvwEINCp2ply3KVJC_8QZGC4_0SJ5CJK4zLdk_ZIYl/s1600/IMG_1761.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3EfbQjxNaO99YjA3DsLtIKZGEbOjlN1ddnjEbWE-43-1jkTScD4PvlmB1UpXg9rf4fx4fVeViBhqBrt7w1Gi84gKxKYhweadOO4bvwEINCp2ply3KVJC_8QZGC4_0SJ5CJK4zLdk_ZIYl/s400/IMG_1761.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
I wanted to make seafood gumbo for Easter, but there is so little seafood available, and it costs so much, I just couldn't face it. Spending a fortune isn't in the spirit of gumbo. It's meant to be a dish into which you throw just anything you can. This experimental gumbo contains the kind of 'just anything' you can find in London, for a family with at least one member who won't eat pork:<br />
<ul>
<li>Sweet potato</li>
<li>Spicy olive dumplings, masquerading as spicy sausage</li>
<li>Halloumi, masquerading as bacon</li>
<li>Okra, pre-roasted to break down the sliminess </li>
</ul>
And also:<br />
<ul>
<li> A roux cooked till it looks like molasses</li>
<li>A stock, with bay leaves, garlic and thyme, salt, pepper, paprika and cayenne</li>
<li>Chopped onions, peppers and celery</li>
</ul>
Looks like it's cooked in Guiness, goes well with chocolate Easter Egg for dessert. Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-65945663189998163232015-10-18T10:19:00.001-07:002015-10-18T10:19:45.950-07:00Disbelieving in ApolloI needed some spiritual renewal this Sunday, having possibly spent a bit too much of Saturday 'disbelieving in' Bacchus. Today will therefore be spent with the equally non-existent Apollo. In accordance, with long-standing religious tradition, let's begin with an injunction to avoid having too much fun. Apollo is the god of music, so here's Plato coming across like an evangelical Christian:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"Our music was once divided into its proper forms... There were no
whistles, unmusical mob-noises, or clapping for applause. The rule was
to listen silently and learn; boys, teachers, and the crowd were kept in
order by threat of the stick... Later, an unmusical anarchy was
led by poets who had natural talent... Through foolishness they deceived themselves into thinking that
there was no right or wrong way in music, that it was to be judged good
or bad by the pleasure it gave" </i></blockquote>
I immediately broke this rule by enjoying the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphic_Hymns" target="_blank">First and Second Delphic Hymns to Apollo</a> but your mileage may vary. These hymns are reconstituted from fragments of ancient Greek notation dated to 128 BCE, though I do suspect they're arranged to suit modern ears. If you hate them, well done, Plato would approve!<br />
<br />
First Delphic Hymn to Apollo<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6yhmYbuIEPM" width="420"></iframe><br />
<br />
Second Delphic Hymn to Apollo<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gf33cXsUHwY" width="420"></iframe><br />
<br />
When I was young and single enough to have a favorite poet, and that poet was W.H.Auden, I happily bought into his denunciation of Apollo in the poem entitled <i>Under Which Lyre</i>. True, he favored Hermes instead:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"The sons of Hermes love to play,</i><br />
<i>And only do their best when they</i><br />
<i>Are told they oughtn't;</i><br />
<i>Apollo's children never shrink</i><br />
<i>From boring jobs but have to think</i><br />
<i>Their work important."</i></blockquote>
It sounds like J.K.Rowling was inspired by this passage when she was creating the Hogwarts houses and in retrospect, those 20th century Oxford/Cambridge types like Auden probably did spend far too much time disbelieving in Greek gods. The interesting aspect of their habit is that it played quite a role in gay history - or at least the gay history of the upper classes - by exposing educated young men to a society where homosexuality had an acceptable form. But the important thing for me here is that Auden gives some really good tips on how not to believe in Apollo.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Onthemorningthomas4.jpg#/media/File:Onthemorningthomas4.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Onthemorningthomas4.jpg" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Onthemorningthomas4.jpg" width="249" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William Blake, who also disbelieved in Apollo, <br />
depicts <i>The Overthrow of Apollo and the <br />Pagan Gods</i> (on the morning of Christ's Nativity)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases,</i><br />
<i>Thou shalt not write thy doctor's thesis</i><br />
<i>On education,</i><br />
<i>Thou shalt not worship projects nor</i><br />
<i>Shalt thou bow down before</i><br />
<i>Administration.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Thou shalt not answer questionnaires</i><br />
<i>Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,</i><br />
<i>Nor with compliance</i><br />
<i>Take any test. Thou shalt not sit</i><br />
<i>With statisticians nor commit</i><br />
<i>A social science.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Thou shalt not be on friendly terms</i><br />
<i>With guys in advertising firms,</i><br />
<i>Nor speak with such</i><br />
<i>As read the Bible for its prose,</i><br />
<i>Nor, above all, make love to those</i><br />
<i>Who wash too much.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Thou shalt not live within thy means</i><br />
<i>Nor on plain water and raw greens.</i><br />
<i>If thou must choose </i><br />
<i>Between the chances, choose the odd;</i><br />
<i>Read the New Yorker, trust in God;</i><br />
<i>And take short views."</i></blockquote>
<br />
I only agree with about half of all that. In many ways, I suspect Auden was misled on the subject of Apollo who was often quite disorderly and chaotic, bringing plagues and healing alternately, prophesying in mind-altering-substance-induced riddles, threatening not to make the sun rise at the drop of a hat, and trying to sleep with large numbers of humans and supernaturals of any sex whether they wanted him or not.<br />
<br />
Since I disbelieve in him I won't have to take sides, which is good because bad things tended to happen to people on the opposite side of Apollo in competitions. Midas disliked his music and got donkey ears for his pains (maybe I should have mentioned that earlier) and Marsyas was flayed alive for losing a music competition against him. In other words, Apollo was a Bad Boy and worse than that, he was cute by definition.<br />
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
<a class="image" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Delphichymn.jpg"></a>
Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-66230189988735143672015-10-18T07:06:00.001-07:002015-10-18T07:06:54.888-07:00Birthday cake with camels - because why not?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
So, I was requested to make a birthday cake with camels.... because camels are in, obviously, and anyone who didn't know that is out, equally obviously.<br />
<br />
DAY 1 AM: mess around trying to make cut-out camels from marzipan, then trying to make a cookie cutter to make cut-out camels from marzipan. Failed dismally. PM: started free modeling giant camels out of marzipan and was reasonably good at it. Had a blast. Went out to buy cake dowels to stop the camels from squashing the cake.<br />
<br />
DAY 2 AM: decided to use new chocolate cake recipe off the internet. WARNING!!! Do not use<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/recipes/9948312/Mark-Hix-chocolate-cake.html" target="_blank"> this recipe</a>. It has ten times too much sugar, probably as the result of a typo. I was tired and didn't notice, especially as it repeats the error lower down. Ended up with chocolate marshmallow fluff. PM: started again using tried and tested <a href="http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/cuisine/european/french/chocolate-prune-and-armagnac-cake.html" target="_blank">Delia Smith recipe</a> with chocolate buttercream filling instead of prunes. Inserted cake dowels with hovering camels on top. Collapsed into bed.<br />
<br />
DAY 3 AM & PM: ate, drank and made merry.<br />
<br />
DAY 4: hangover.<br />
<br />
This was not my fanciest cake ever. This one was much more elaborate in appearance, but didn't taste as good.<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-23907116078089404552015-10-10T05:35:00.000-07:002015-10-10T05:35:14.057-07:00Cartoon Saloon's feature-length animationsThis is what we were watching while we were sick. Beautiful animations, music and stories.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Song of the Sea</h3>
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7erpJFZhvTU" width="560"></iframe>
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My only complaint: it made us cry a lot. Also SPOILER WARNING AHEAD---- If you're half selkie and half human and you're forced to choose to give up one of your halves at the ripe old age of six, that doesn't actually make you all human or all selkie, does it? It just means you've been horrifically amputated of half your being. So that's not very sweet and endearing and romantic.<br />
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<h4>
The Secret of Kells </h4>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lw2_HZTuQBE" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
This is about the making of the Book of Kells. To my astonishment, there seem to some people around who have not heard of this book. We were interested in how the drawing developed between the Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea. Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-38506180968564893022015-10-06T00:58:00.000-07:002015-10-06T00:58:28.114-07:00New Joan Littlewood sculpture<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNX6p_DHgORYkh7fHxJAaxa3VSIr3vmC6fxsT4VRwsQLM_reyTm8rPRSvrD0A_ryyqWxFH4G3cuabF7CSkx4Br3ACeY7m4pRgloTmUFPjFobij1TG-haE5agyBKfIzFC9uF9HGID6WGpbC/s1600/Joan.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNX6p_DHgORYkh7fHxJAaxa3VSIr3vmC6fxsT4VRwsQLM_reyTm8rPRSvrD0A_ryyqWxFH4G3cuabF7CSkx4Br3ACeY7m4pRgloTmUFPjFobij1TG-haE5agyBKfIzFC9uF9HGID6WGpbC/s320/Joan.JPG" width="238" /></a></div>
The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Littlewood" target="_blank">Joan Littlewood</a> sculpture by <a href="http://philipjacksonsculptures.co.uk/Philip_Jackson/index.htm" target="_blank">Philip Jackson</a> just unveiled outside the <a href="http://www.stratfordeast.com/" target="_blank">Theatre Royal Stratford East</a> on Sunday. A few quid well spent, I think.... from my point of view anyway, I think other people might have contributed more than a few quid.<br />
<br />
I love the sculpture. Also I love the quote on the front of theatre (you can only see some of it):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"I built my life on the rock of change"
</i></blockquote>
We had a beautiful autumnal day for the unveiling, then had to skip some of the festivities in order to carry out quality control on pizza and beer at The Crate, and to inspect the proper functioning of the locks along the canal. We came back for Joan's Jamboree in the evening and had a blast. Best Sunday for a while!!!Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-91847678638841829762015-10-03T00:48:00.000-07:002015-10-05T00:49:50.116-07:00<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8QALehbbysE" width="560"></iframe>
<br />
What I went to see on a whim this Friday night.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<a href="http://www.hofesh.co.uk/productions/hofesh-shechter-company-productions/hofest/hofesh-shechtersdegeneration" target="_blank">Hofesh Shechter presents <b><i>deGeneration</i></b></a>, an
inspiring opportunity to see the youngest dancers of Hofesh Shechter
Company at the start of very promising careers, take on Shechter’s world
and perform it with the ferocious physicality and intimate sensitivity
for which his Company is internationally renowned. </blockquote>
It was very good of course. Strangely enough (if you know me) I just started dance classes - a kind of modern, creative dance. I've been to all of two of them, and they've already changed my perception of dance. Before, the dancers always seemed like a manifestation of the music. I never really thought about what they were doing. Now I'm sitting there thinking 'God, that looks hard'. And also, 'Why are our dance classes full of all this sweetness and light stuff? I want to do darker emotions, like this.'
Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-89784329299849826002015-10-02T14:51:00.001-07:002015-10-02T14:51:44.097-07:00SLAP at the Theatre Royal Stratord EastWow, that was intense! I don't quite know what to say about <a href="http://www.stratfordeast.com/whats-on/all-shows/slap" target="_blank">Slap</a> that wouldn't count as a spoiler. Well, maybe just one thing. When I read the blurb,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...Dominique, a glamorous transsexual hooker in the throes
of an emotional meltdown, caught between a rock and hard face, juggling
a stalker client with a crush and her cute, chavved out, drugged up
boyf who hasn’t got out the bath in a week... </blockquote>
I thought, having known the occasional bloke who hasn't got into the bath for a week, that it could have been worse.<br />
<br />
Well it was.<br />
<br />
Much, much worse.<br />
<br />
Wow. Lot's of fun though.Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-927044778748432962015-09-30T21:20:00.001-07:002015-09-30T21:20:44.399-07:00Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_SlHJG6uAWV2a-F3CxT74U42SIIdItuZMXnPTPP43d-mp9Jihbq9bzmQHHoSa8CYWrZ6jnkZktpM-Br8WK7B8PA-mggXul-nliF1UA6IxZx73PLqG_yjvwqegxVuScrZDMdqlLQfsXvxn/s1600/Gone.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_SlHJG6uAWV2a-F3CxT74U42SIIdItuZMXnPTPP43d-mp9Jihbq9bzmQHHoSa8CYWrZ6jnkZktpM-Br8WK7B8PA-mggXul-nliF1UA6IxZx73PLqG_yjvwqegxVuScrZDMdqlLQfsXvxn/s1600/Gone.bmp" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">There's some seriously weird shit going on here...</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
This edition of anti-racist art reviewed features one of African-American artist Kara Walker’s best known works - the one with the superlong title in the heading. I happened across it in MOMA in New York about three weeks ago and at first, I drew a total blank at making sense of it. I tentatively attributed this to the fact that I’m not American enough, and filed it away to think about and/or research. Even now, I’m not sure it counts as anti-racist art so much as art about race, and I’m not sure this counts as a review, so much as an exploration. I’m going to organize it around the three things <a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/works/110565" target="_blank">MOMA’s own label</a> thinks <i>Gone </i>can do for us.<br />
<br />
<h4>
1. Refute the promise of romance </h4>
<br />
Kara Walker’s <i>Gone </i>is connected with a book I haven’t read: <i>Gone With the Wind</i>, a 1936 historical romance by Margaret Mitchell, which is apparently immensely popular in the USA. From the little I knew of its plot, I was pretty sure it would not be my kind of thing. It turns out that Kara Walker and I are on the same page here. <a href="http://www.art21.org/texts/kara-walker/interview-kara-walker-the-melodrama-of-gone-with-the-wind" target="_blank">She has said</a>, ‘<i>Gone with the Wind</i> was one of those books that I already had preconceived ideas about: I already knew that I wasn’t going to like it.’ Then she read it of course, and had to deal with the fact that it’s one of those ‘can’t-put-it-down’ kind of books.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzKJsRe6Vc6zRr5TqQxY8qbWN-N_RQu2O0UklGzOslst3CBZTP67b2pMvdgAAZ3mZSiGPO5-t5-7qsmVUVgll-v5HtdbcvNcWPmFWuy8rYS27d-EUqi_WtLmQyj3qlX21lOA_hI70iOfJk/s1600/Scarlett.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzKJsRe6Vc6zRr5TqQxY8qbWN-N_RQu2O0UklGzOslst3CBZTP67b2pMvdgAAZ3mZSiGPO5-t5-7qsmVUVgll-v5HtdbcvNcWPmFWuy8rYS27d-EUqi_WtLmQyj3qlX21lOA_hI70iOfJk/s1600/Scarlett.bmp" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Scarlett O'Hara getting it on?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I do sort of know the plot outline of <i>Gone With the Wind</i>. It’s the story of a young white southern woman from a plantation-owning family, who, between the ages of 16 and 25 has several children by three different men without actually being in love with any of them. In the meantime, the civil war causes her a certain amount of personal hardship and leaves her fighting courageously for the survival of a lifestyle we all disapprove of. Also, she isn’t a particularly nice person.<br />
<br />
I can see that there is a connection between Kara Walker’s frieze and the book, in that both feature grotesque and sometimes violent sexual disorderliness with a civil war setting and costumes, only in the artwork the sexual shenanigans are interracial and rather more extreme and explicit than those in Mitchell’s book.<br />
<br />
Conclusion: promise of romance not refuted, because <i>Gone With the Wind</i> turns me off anyway. YMMV.<br />
<br />
<h4>
2. Critique historical narratives of slavery and the ongoing perpetuation of ethnic stereotypes. </h4>
<br />
Maybe I would have to read <i>Gone With the Wind</i> to know which historical narratives of slavery are being critiqued here, but when it comes to the ongoing perpetuation of ethnic stereotypes, we are cooking with fire. Or playing with fire, maybe: when I was researching people’s reactions to Walker’s work, that of fellow African-American artist Betye Saar floated to the top of Google search.<br />
<br />
Saar does not like Kara Walker’s work at all.
<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10314794/Southern-discomfort-artist-Kara-Walker-continues-to-shock-and-awe.html" target="_blank">According to the Telegraph</a>, she "conducted a noisy campaign to get Walker’s work banned from public galleries, arguing that her imagery played straight into white fantasies about black people as a sexualised underclass." <a href="http://www.art21.org/texts/kara-walker/interview-kara-walker-the-melodrama-of-gone-with-the-wind" target="_blank">Kara herself has said</a>, "You know, what black stands for in white America and what white stands for in white America are all loaded with our deepest psychological perversions and fears and longings." Which is sort of interesting because it starts to look like a debate among African-Americans in which the subject of contestation is what white people think. And here's me, not knowing what I think, if anything.<br />
<br />
Fortunately, there are some more coherent white people around, like Jerry Saltz, <a href="http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/40277/" target="_blank">reviewing Walker’s exhibition <i>My Complement, My Enemy, My Opressor, My Love</i></a>. He says that her work makes him feel "sickened, thrilled, terrified," he describes it as a "toxic shock" and says that "Even the title (of <i>Gone</i>) is contaminated."
Hmm, I think he might be referring to that rather old-fashioned word ‘Negress’. And then, it’s true that the pictorial languages of racial representation Walker has decided to engage with are quite ‘old-fashioned’. I’d initially attributed this to the demands of the medium. If everybody is a black silhouette on a white background and you still want their race to be legible, you’re probably going to have to caricature a bit. Although, it <i>was </i>Kara Walker’s choice to use a medium that demanded that kind of exaggeration. And I can appreciate the point that where racial representations are concerned, ‘old-fashioned’ probably means bad.<br />
<br />
Come to think of it, I really did know that quite a few white Americans think of everything from America’s racial past as a contaminant, a sort of poison which continues to infect their society and relationships today. And while I can <i>think </i>the same thing, many of them also seem to <i>feel </i>it very intensely and viscerally.<br />
<br />
Conclusion: ongoing perpetuation of stereotypes critiqued, by the viewers, if not by the work.<br />
<br />
<h4>
3. Confound conventional attributions of power and oppression</h4>
<br />
Another thing that Saltz and several other white reviewers bring up fairly consistently is a response of anger, or rage, generally projected onto Walker herself. I’m not quite sure that’s where it belongs, at any rate, I haven’t seen her state or express that emotion directly. I do wonder if it isn’t partly a direct projection by white people onto black people, something like ‘well of course, you must be angry, how could you not be?’ True enough. But it’s also, I suspect, the anger of white people themselves (after all, they’ve found themselves dumped by history in the middle of a pile of toxic contaminants) and that they may be having a hard time, given those ‘conventional attributions of power and oppression’, fully owning and expressing their rage. It seems quite possible, given the dynamics of the situation, that they need black people to be angry on their behalf.<br />
<br />
Also, if anyone is going to dig up the contaminants and show that they can be played with, they may feel they need a black person to do that as well. Honestly, I don’t think many white people believe a white artist could get away with work like this right now (supposing they wanted to try). Walker only just gets away with it herself. On the other hand, white people probably do make up a significant proportion of the audience. I daresay it does confound conventional attributions of power and oppression that they are prepared to cede the active role in this territory to black artists and willingly submit themselves to something that makes them feel contaminated, sickened, terrified, etc - notwithstanding the fact that the content Walker serves up nominally assigns them the dominant role. It is she, the black woman, who is clearly the initiator and controller of this particular enterprise.<br />
<br />
Conclusion: yeah, the power attributions are quite complicated. As for oppression, we're supposed to be consensual participants these days, right? ...except for Betye Saar and other members of the public who end up seeing without consenting.... <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH957GeD3XOebl3VwZZQ05yYI9HQSwv1HXohiWFywCQvsbAWrkHt6Cq-XNzkj9c6TA25YvXSi1SFN2euYGy2Bi5PLosfAX3QuSCCOab7RN2kRsTp-O3UqTLDa7ceisUK-sJhPpVOWc6Tse/s1600/Fantasies.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH957GeD3XOebl3VwZZQ05yYI9HQSwv1HXohiWFywCQvsbAWrkHt6Cq-XNzkj9c6TA25YvXSi1SFN2euYGy2Bi5PLosfAX3QuSCCOab7RN2kRsTp-O3UqTLDa7ceisUK-sJhPpVOWc6Tse/s1600/Fantasies.bmp" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fantasies? What fan... oh, those fantasies! <br />Actually, those are Kara Walker's fantasies, <br />not mine.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
So what do I think of <i>Gone </i>in the end? Well, let’s make no bones about it, it's like a lot of Walker's work: S&M erotica built around racial as well as gender differences. I'm pretty sure from the interviews I've read with Walker that she's actively and consciously embracing that whole thing. I get around enough to be aware that she isn’t the only one. It takes all sorts, I suppose. Sex with a helping of violence isn’t really for me, with or without racial overtones. When you add the latter, I have a tendency to go all historian and look over the top of my glasses and say things like "you do realize that this is ultimately about real stuff that really happened to actual real people don’t you?" Only in Walker's case, it probably isn't meant to be. You can call <i>Gone </i>history painting if you like, but it's really for and about people today and what they might choose to do with the <strike>historical evidence</strike> left-over toxic contaminants. Like play 'terrifying' erotic games with them? Really?<br />
<br />
I'm still not sure if I really get <i>Gone</i>, but I wanted to get this post written before I go to view Walker's latest work, <i>Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First</i>, <a href="http://www.victoria-miro.com/exhibitions/481/" target="_blank">which just opened in London</a>. I'm expecting to do better at engaging with <i>Hell or Atlanta</i>, partly because I know Walker's work a little better now, and partly because it seems to have a more purely historical and art historical theme. I may even end up reviewing a piece of explicitly and deliberately pro-racist art in the process, which is weirdly interesting.Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-23306628505549952462015-09-30T19:38:00.003-07:002015-09-30T19:38:51.350-07:00Steinbeck, misogyny and point of viewWhen I found out my daughter was studying Steinbeck at school, I was a bit wary about the level of misogyny in the education department's book choices. Steinbeck's handling of his female characters is, frankly, at its best when he doesn't mention them at all. Otherwise, they're virtuous wives and mothers in the home or whores in the brothel, right?<br />
<br />
Turns out my daughter didn't see things quite that way - or rather, she didn't particularly notice the women at all. She just explained to me that a brothel "is a place men go to waste all their money on having sex with as many people as possible". Hmmm.... Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-14716551194324827812015-08-10T13:37:00.004-07:002015-08-10T13:37:52.049-07:00Hotel room lunches, USA style<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZEEfaiaoPeYyLRnhsDFYE4CXD8qBshxP555CKjh7wO1b-FCy83MxcCYLaSkfnOwfNADfFeIChfg6Zy9zjiEE8IA8Psp88Yth4N-r7E2nDwRsGJJgGtMP0a6sX3UW7r7SQVJnbsjOzXEcX/s1600/Beef+jerky+on+watermelon.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZEEfaiaoPeYyLRnhsDFYE4CXD8qBshxP555CKjh7wO1b-FCy83MxcCYLaSkfnOwfNADfFeIChfg6Zy9zjiEE8IA8Psp88Yth4N-r7E2nDwRsGJJgGtMP0a6sX3UW7r7SQVJnbsjOzXEcX/s320/Beef+jerky+on+watermelon.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
So, I made it to the United States of America, despite the sterling efforts of United States Border Control to make me miss my flight... Now I'm here, I'm finding that I still love Chicago but the Chicago style pizza I ate yesterday was enough to feed a family for a week - and so is pretty much everything else you can buy. So here's today's very American gourmet lunch: beef jerky on watermelon cubes. Better than its photograph.Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-67749153685527908642015-07-31T11:13:00.002-07:002015-07-31T11:13:13.995-07:00Icelandic ElvesLast time I was in Iceland, it was the best I could do to appreciate the scenery - and learn to cope with the weather! This time, I'm doing much better on understanding the history and culture. This post contains my thoughts on Icelandic elves, to be followed, if the Internet holds out over the next day or so, with a post about Icelandic sea monsters. I learned from Alda Sigmundsdóttir (see references at the end of the post) that Icelanders are all supposed to believe in elves, although she herself finds this assertion somewhat annoying. It would probably be fairer to say that Icelanders have traditionally had a lot of stories about elves. So, where do Icelandic elves come from and what are they like? Well, they partly come from a common European tradition, I expect, but I have my own ideas, based on hiking experiences in Iceland.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2fFUXXwaenRkfRvLxSPbBaGZC_nsdPFzMkMPltpeFRXRLvssRXUjyEZGvRdpB13ohcNrFk6_biUdcSDYJu2gBO03r0sShfl1BTpyrUEpCGU5pj-1tunb8li768lMkFOeZGDYfTHJxzz2y/s1600/Summer+in+Iceland.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2fFUXXwaenRkfRvLxSPbBaGZC_nsdPFzMkMPltpeFRXRLvssRXUjyEZGvRdpB13ohcNrFk6_biUdcSDYJu2gBO03r0sShfl1BTpyrUEpCGU5pj-1tunb8li768lMkFOeZGDYfTHJxzz2y/s400/Summer+in+Iceland.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Summer in Iceland! That patch of water does not represent some high mountain lake, either, but the sea as I was arriving from Denmark. Of course, it all looks very different when the sun is out.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
In Iceland’s past, it must at times have been as difficult to distinguish between the signs of human civilization and the works of nature as it was for 19th Century observers of Martian canals. Even today, I’ve followed hiking paths which were not so much trails on the ground as a question of knowing which geographical feature you’re meant to be following. Across the high plateaus, the way is marked by cairns, and in a good light, if they’re well-maintained, it’s reasonably easy to distinguish between a cairn and a pile of stones. In the all too common fog, not so much - and those wretched piles of stones have a way of forming themselves into alignments quite naturally.<br />
<br />
These days, Icelandic houses can seem quite attention seeking, with their bright red or blue roofs. When they were basically mounds of turf, I daresay they could look a lot like the other mounds of turf which aren’t houses - at least not human ones. And if the life of travelers depended on distinguishing the human ones (as it probably would from time to time), and avoiding the false ones which could lead them astray and consume essential time, energy and resources, their minds, senses and emotions would inevitably become intensely focused on these signs. All that mental intensity, that question mark over whether a feature was natural or man-made had to go somewhere - and I suspect some of it went into elves.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjN7Ub7W2M4jYnsTzNfaw61SnhxH9Zopt4CZdeelOu8Dqm-e1LuO9hAcMCxLXV_VF1hX7FNRGQ6BPlbnYdU2pTOvzp5TjflbH-wfbcOO_yLdtU4YvK8I774KpT8qo4DJ2cVe0ayrXQjbYI/s1600/King+Cairn.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjN7Ub7W2M4jYnsTzNfaw61SnhxH9Zopt4CZdeelOu8Dqm-e1LuO9hAcMCxLXV_VF1hX7FNRGQ6BPlbnYdU2pTOvzp5TjflbH-wfbcOO_yLdtU4YvK8I774KpT8qo4DJ2cVe0ayrXQjbYI/s400/King+Cairn.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The king of cairns, made by the guys who built the road across this rather desolate high plateau, just because....</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
There’s still the behavior of Icelandic elves to consider. From the stories, they don’t really come across as particularly closely connected with nature, unlike the elves further south who are often half way to being nature spirits. Icelanders were probably as closely connected with nature themselves as they could just about stand, and it’s a feature of people in struggling agricultural and pastoral economies throughout the world that what they actually aspire to get closer to is a state of civilization, not a state of nature as some of us might. Icelandic elves live like Icelanders - except not quite! They live as Icelanders thought they would be living if everything went well for them: like rich Icelanders whose flocks and fields always do well. They have fine houses (still made of turf), fine clothes (of wool), plenty of sheep and they never run out of food, but what they don’t have is a different kind of society to the human Icelanders. More southerly Europeans also imagined the fairy world on the model of the fortunate in their society, their elites, and ended up with royal courts presided over by elven kings and queens. The situation is not so different in Iceland, but the Icelandic elites were in a different place.<br />
<br />
Icelandic elves also seem to work as proto-deities. They’re potentially dangerous and threatening. Sometimes they take children or even adults, and possibly those people are going to a better place. It must be said that the demands of adult labor meant child supervision was limited, the demands of child labor meant children were often alone, and Iceland is a dangerous place, therefore children (and adults) had a tendency to disappear. On the good side, you could use elves to warn children away from places which were likely to be dangerous. While in Iceland, I read Sjón’s <i>From the Mouth of the Whale</i>, and particularly enjoyed the part in which Jonas Palmason reminisces about his childhood experiences at the elven mound: the immense fear of the mound with had been created in him by the adults around him, and the amazing revelation of what lay within.<br />
<br />
Sometimes however, children were replaced by useless old elven men who appeared to be suffering from learning difficulties or behavioral issues, and then, I’m afraid, the way to get your own child back was to beat the imposter ruthlessly.
The elves are not necessarily nice people, but people they certainly are. They can reward you if they like you, or if you help them. It’s possible to do deals with them. Sometimes young elven men formed relationships with the young unmarried human women who spent their summers alone in the mountain dairies and caused unexpected pregnancies. Most unusually - or perhaps not, given the elvish affection for human children - these elven men didn’t try to avoid their parental responsibilities, often taking charge of the child and raising it themselves in the elvish world. Alas, I suspect the unwanted babies in question were indeed ‘left out for the elves’. Basically, elves caused a lot of the unwanted difficulties in life, but they also smoothed them over. Elites, they might be, but they were useful ones.<br />
<br />
<u><b>References</b></u><br />
<ul>
<li>Alda Sigmundsdóttir: The Little Book of Icelanders in the Old Days; The Little Book of the Hidden People: Stories of Elves from Icelandic Folklore</li>
<li>Sjón: From the Mouth of the Whale (highly recommended, btw)</li>
<li>There is a museum dedicated to Icelandic elves (and trolls and ghosts) at Stokkseyri, about 70km from Reykjavik in Iceland </li>
</ul>
Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-85525780135807230282015-07-28T09:04:00.000-07:002015-07-31T11:13:54.207-07:00Magical realism, and a year of battling over the boundaries of fantasy<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbKxdsz-esnV-P81ORogEcUL7Qdc7eqwQho_0GVMjOLV97kzMPWKLYWR4bqothqIDiQYsZuTdHk9_7CreheY2i18Ly3mOaf94iODzp33vXP_Qt1sJL-GMhNYD-VmoeB4FE-MR1lvrUNyJ2/s1600/blog+hop+2015+dates.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbKxdsz-esnV-P81ORogEcUL7Qdc7eqwQho_0GVMjOLV97kzMPWKLYWR4bqothqIDiQYsZuTdHk9_7CreheY2i18Ly3mOaf94iODzp33vXP_Qt1sJL-GMhNYD-VmoeB4FE-MR1lvrUNyJ2/s200/blog+hop+2015+dates.jpg" width="196" /></a>Last year a really cool thing called Worldcon happened almost outside my front door, so of course I went along, with my husband the hard core Science Fiction fan, and my daughter, the Japanese anime fan. It was fantastic, especially thanks to the focus it place on all kinds of diversity. SFF fandom tends to the Anglo, a word I’m using here (with some misgivings) to mean white AND native English speaking, but lots of people certainly wanted more demographic diversity, of writers, and if possible, of fellow fans.<br />
<br />
Fast forward nearly a year and I’m embarked on a long, slow trip to the next Worldcon to be held in Spokane, Washington. It may turn out to be the last for a while. Worldcon, or at least the Hugo award it hands out each year, has gone to the dogs (<a href="http://www.bustle.com/articles/74596-how-the-2015-hugo-awards-became-a-battlefield-and-not-over-science-fiction">a link for anyone who doesn’t get the dog reference</a>).
<br />
The leader of the Rabid Puppies, the most successful canine faction, makes no bones about the strength of his preference for Anglo culture, especially the most conservative, xenophobic branches of it. The less successful Sad Puppies whine at suggestions that they might be trying to exclude anyone. They just want good, old-fashioned, unpretentious genre fantasy and science-fiction, and they don’t care who writes it.<br />
<br />
The trouble is that demographic diversity of writers isn’t very likely to come unaccompanied by literary diversity. The fantastic, magical, supernatural and numinous are related forms of something which finds expression everywhere in culturally differentiated ways. Anglo genre fantasy is just a small subset of this spectrum. Presumed truth values, perceived literary value, types of motifs and interactions with the real world vary, as does literary form (more or less closely related to oral forms), and the status and role of writer and reader.<br />
<br />
Consider next year's proposed Mistress of Hounds <a href="http://madgeniusclub.com/2015/05/28/so-what-is-hugo-worthy-anyway/">Kate Paulk’s</a> emphasis on immersion in her analysis of what makes a book Hugo-worthy. It’s an esoteric thing, this ‘immersion’, a culturally specific practice of altering states of consciousness through words. It’s not clear that it’s either desired, or even easily accessible, outside the cultures in which it is practiced. Consider science-fiction as a genre: when it’s not fantasy with technology instead of magic, isn’t it a variation on prophecy? Is 'World'-con to be reserved for Anglo-specific cultural forms?<br />
<br />
One of the points non-Anglo writers brought up again and again at Loncon 3 was that the core expectations of western fiction, expectations as ‘basic’ as plot form, conflict, focus on individual characters, ‘showing-not-telling’ don’t mesh well with their cultural priorities. Even those close neighbors of the Anglo cultural zone, the North Europeans of Scandinavia and Germany seem to favor far more exposition than is usually recommended in the Anglo literature. The French tend towards poetics and philosophy, and the 'tale', fairy or otherwise, is an important form with them.<br />
<br />
Consequently, to say you want more diversity in the fantasy genre can mean one of two things: either you hope to convert people of other cultures to the minutiae of your own, or you intend to tear down the walls between genres and create a mixed reading space, open to numerous traditions of the fantastic.<br />
<br />
Magical realism is one alternative form of the fantastic, the one I write, though hardly the only one. My own reading list also includes books with links to the tradition of animal fables like Alain Mabanckou’s <i>Memoirs of the Porcupine</i> (after all we have werewolves and witchcraft - why not porcupines and witchcraft?); mythopoeics (is that a word?) like Kazuo Ishiguro’s <i>Buried Giant</i> (not a million miles in spirit from Alan Garner); or works based in religion and spirituality: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s <i>Palace of Illusions</i> reads an awful lot like the Katherine Anddison’s <i>Goblin Emperor</i>, and as the Puppies seem particularly keen to bring Christianity to our reading lists, why not also Hinduism? I read and enjoy books like these for the same reasons I read and enjoy fantasy. My own reading has been effortlessly demographically diverse, largely because I trawl through the literary shelves of the bookshops at the same time as the fantasy ones.<br />
<br />
What I write is definitely magical realism, the combination or magical elements with a real world setting. It also has that feature associated with several core magical realist works: it makes sense as post-colonial literature - or are we post-globalized by now? - at any rate, it is about identity, especially cultural, and the way it emerges from the building blocks of history and politics, daily life and relationships. Where it nods towards the traditions of Anglo fantasy and science-fiction - dragons and UFOs for example - it’s because of the cultural identity of the protagonist, and she has many strings to her bow, as people do: the classical culture of the elites, the popular culture of her ancestors, fairy tales for her daughter, essays for academia… It even uses language in a way that expresses these variations, and others regarding <i>her </i>state of consciousness, rather than aiming at the hypnotic immersion of the reader.<br />
<br />
I know, of course, that this kind of writing isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (what is?) but with Loncon’s panel talks systematically turning away an overflow of people who wanted to talk about the kinds of issues I also found relevant and interesting, I came away feeling positive about throwing in my lot with a broad SFF community. I felt I could fit in, both as a reader and a writer, and my family circumstances favored my ongoing participation (a particularly important detail for many women and members of non-Anglo cultures).<br />
<br />
A few months later, when Kazuo Ishiguro and Ursula Le Guin had <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/mar/05/kazuo-ishiguro-the-buried-giant-fantasy-novel">their little discussion about whether Ishiguro’s latest book, Buried Giant, counted as fantasy or not</a>, I understood both sides. Of course, the literary shelves are filled with books like Ishiguro’s and many of them are by non-Anglo authors. And perhaps the only reason Le Guin thought Ishiguro’s book should be fantasy is that a book can’t get much more Anglo in appearance than by mythologizing the Dark Ages of Britain, regardless of the fact that the author is a Briton of Japanese origin?<br />
<br />
Authors seem to benefit financially from literary status and it also allows them to be taken seriously across a broad range of cultural groups, especially within their own (another issue raised by some non-Anglo writers at Loncon 3). On top of that, translation of foreign works into English currently follows a principle of parsimony - a book must seem ‘necessary’ in order to qualify for translation, with the result that being literary is almost a pre-condition for being translated. This severely limits the available writer demographic for genre literature - though it favors translation of other fantastic forms, such as magical realism.<br />
<br />
All the same, I understood Le Guin’s frustration. The presence of authors whose value is recognized by a larger world raises the status - and the interest level - of the SFF genre. The idea that a ‘good’ author can’t be writing fantasy must quite justifiably seem like an affront to her, and looks like sheer snobbery on the part of those who do such categorizing.<br />
<br />
Just about a month after that, I wondered if Le Guin felt embarrassed after the Puppies made it so very clear that they wanted to aggressively exclude from SFF the very type of writer she’d been castigating for keeping a distance. Even as a part member of the Anglo cultural group, it felt quite disturbing, to have the kind of literature I like to read and write made the target of such an explicit assault. I’m not optimistic about its effect on non-Anglo writers and the fans who certainly seem to want them.<br />
<br />
*** Correction: I'm told Spokane is in Washington, not Idaho, so I changed it. Now at least, I'll end up in the right place!! *** <br />
<br />
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</script> <i></i> Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-47985685390494548842015-07-20T07:35:00.001-07:002015-07-20T07:35:24.724-07:00I made it through Denmark...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBV-JGqXRjEttqZbTUMOEbQD8ig2qr00AZoiGq9ZZkn4xECfRjcY2DZKELl1-l1HHcNN-a40Pyhy3ooIk7Gel6NdeO03duFms5qPewHsQpPr5ocjcirmjTk_FUK1P-krB19alVt_vF3HIl/s1600/Boat+and+poppies.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBV-JGqXRjEttqZbTUMOEbQD8ig2qr00AZoiGq9ZZkn4xECfRjcY2DZKELl1-l1HHcNN-a40Pyhy3ooIk7Gel6NdeO03duFms5qPewHsQpPr5ocjcirmjTk_FUK1P-krB19alVt_vF3HIl/s400/Boat+and+poppies.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
After a couple of days of solid train travel, I made it to Aalborg in the north of Denmark. Tomorrow, fingers crossed, I will be on the ferry to Iceland. Aalborg is beautiful, and where I'm staying, out of town among the marinas and summer cabins, is extra nice. The south of Denmark looked really very similar to Britain, but here in the north, there's a more Scandinavian feel. It's all sun, water and windswept grasses where I'm staying, and boats... lots and lots of boats! I feel like I haven't had this much exposure to ozone for years. This is from one of the boat yards along the way into town, I just liked it with the poppies. Now I have to start bracing myself for less summery weather in Iceland.Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-43293566278928541792015-07-16T16:00:00.001-07:002015-07-17T23:19:00.174-07:00Urban hiking in Cologne<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA5v44KkVV5Z8memnugGmMSNO1y1UNxtOivDcaxzpkj_WXpM470bLNMubWNvED3nnn3lbvXRdNBfFhpoUxEG4A6TzU2Fnmp48CzTHYylx_of32FU6iBfUBhE5AvMDEP3oAq1cn_mtNQi1N/s1600/IMG_1295+-+Flowers+in+Koln.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA5v44KkVV5Z8memnugGmMSNO1y1UNxtOivDcaxzpkj_WXpM470bLNMubWNvED3nnn3lbvXRdNBfFhpoUxEG4A6TzU2Fnmp48CzTHYylx_of32FU6iBfUBhE5AvMDEP3oAq1cn_mtNQi1N/s320/IMG_1295+-+Flowers+in+Koln.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
Cologne has a promenade along both banks of the Rhine, a 'green belt' of parks between the city center and the outer suburbs, a botanical garden and an inner city forest. I must have walked at least 12 miles, almost all of it off road, although if I'd rented a bicycle I could have gone even further.Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-81493761306468498172015-07-16T16:00:00.000-07:002015-07-17T23:14:46.572-07:00Kathe Kollwitz Museum in Cologne<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmLH7SKefCH_wS7nDFau9BjuLK2cMzNNpu4NNp8AoENcJkOc3drHaUbxzTYL0zdLeu6LuM_cNSVep88kavbve4Y5rhTr-IYppPrHruYNxoGDBBUxXom_yWVS1KDhua31s60edqSOswomdc/s1600/IMG_1256%25281%2529+-+Kathe+Kollwitz.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmLH7SKefCH_wS7nDFau9BjuLK2cMzNNpu4NNp8AoENcJkOc3drHaUbxzTYL0zdLeu6LuM_cNSVep88kavbve4Y5rhTr-IYppPrHruYNxoGDBBUxXom_yWVS1KDhua31s60edqSOswomdc/s320/IMG_1256%25281%2529+-+Kathe+Kollwitz.JPG" width="239" /></a></div>
Few artists who can arouse such intense emotion as Kathe Kollwitz, and not many art works are so much better in real life than in reproduction. She had an incredible mastery of her medium but what I especially love is her commitment to humanity. After visiting this museum, I find the kind of modernism which treats the body as pure form especially hollow and really did not want to see the largest collection of Pop Art outside the USA (even though Cologne has that too).<br />
<br />
Kollwitz represented the harder parts of life, especially poverty and the suffering, death and degradation which all too often go with it. I think she understood that no matter what the circumstances, it isn't people who become dehumanized, though their representations, in the media, or in the minds of other people might.Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6672771287885431381.post-2760281038304200312015-07-15T16:00:00.001-07:002015-07-16T08:01:59.125-07:00Cologne, then and now...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuP8U9zXWZIpKtCAdy7rmY-v6peAmk3BfZCCj4A75odxbQt1PjpUjGztZT0bzR8GIMBzKAa5HYq4aYZy1sH9PwEdBz6v1c_SBNa25u8PY2g5LBunL8TycKhSWna7sbV7Rq1KOPFGx2QNCL/s1600/Koln+Cathedral.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuP8U9zXWZIpKtCAdy7rmY-v6peAmk3BfZCCj4A75odxbQt1PjpUjGztZT0bzR8GIMBzKAa5HYq4aYZy1sH9PwEdBz6v1c_SBNa25u8PY2g5LBunL8TycKhSWna7sbV7Rq1KOPFGx2QNCL/s320/Koln+Cathedral.JPG" width="239" /></a></div>
This is just a tiny detail from the amazing, but still blackened facade of Cologne Cathedral. I thought those two figures on the left were quite unusual for medieval sculpture. Slowly, it dawned on me that they're very different from their neighbors and must be modern.<br />
<br />
When I told my father I was going to Cologne, he said he'd last been there in 1954 on a school trip, during which he'd stayed in a youth hostel in an old bomb shelter at the foot of Cologne Cathedral. It's not there now, but I went into a bookshop and browsed through a book of photographs of Cologne in 1945... It was nothing but a pile of rubble around the Cathedral which was still standing. In one picture I could see that the part of the Cathedral adjacent to this was blown out, but it was too fuzzy to show whether the original sculptures were broken then.<br />
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The consequence of the WWII bombing is that Cologne is quite a modern city, but very pleasant to be in, with a large pedestrian district and promenade along the Rhine.Anfenwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16203768296883938536noreply@blogger.com0