50/50

My mother's brother is coming to stay the winter with her in California, arriving December 12th. He, like many Icelanders, gets very depressed over the winter months. My mom has lots of small projects for him to work on--he is a carpenter and my parents own three properties--so it works out well. Three days later, a friend of mine is coming from Iceland to stay with me for just over three weeks, who also finds winter in Iceland depressing. We'll mostly be doing a lot of sight seeing, and I will be trying to unwind from the dissertation stress, but I think it will also be a great opportunity to work out some of my ongoing grammatical issues with Icelandic, as well as catching up on political happenings over there. Needless to say, we will have a lot to talk about.

20 years ago, I was engaged to a nice guy I had met my freshman year of college in California. But before I walked down the aisle and said, "I do", I wanted to go spend some time in Iceland. I had the thought in my head, even back then, that I probably needed to share my life with someone who shared my passion for the Icelandic language, culture, history, and landscape. So I spent two months in Sandgerði, trying to be as much of a local as I could. When I didn't meet anyone special, I decided to go back and get married. I should have probably stayed in Iceland a little longer, instead.

...has been sent off to my dissertation advisor. I think I managed to be intellectual and analytical enough for his scholarly standards, but expository and honest enough to capture my sense of the project. Now to the bibliography and acknowledgements page. I've got people all over the world to thank.

Chapter 3 from my dissertation is I think my favorite, perhaps because I think it is the idea most likely to generate further research in my career. In this chapter, I argue that the landscape itself served as a mnemonic for the story of Þórðar saga hreðu, and that the plot is best explained vis a vis the actual geography of the area. The chapter as is has been approved by my committee, but I want to add a reference to a recent book that dovetails so nicely with my dissertation thesis. The book is called Being Alive: Essays on movement, knowledge, and description by Tim Ingold.  What Tim means to suggest is that there is a fundamental way in which human beings do not learn anything, unless they go somewhere.  Tomorrow, I am going to vote.  P.S. I thought I could attach the chapter here, but Blogger doesn't seem to allow for that. 

I usually permit myself an hour of television viewing a day, although this week with Hurricane Sandy I have been doing more than that. I know some Icelanders think the coverage of that event has been too extensive, but the thing is, there are not a lot of events in the U.S. that affect almost all of us, and well, Sandy happens to be one of them. I do not know anyone who does not have some connection to someone in one of the states affected by the storm. My dad grew up in New Jersey, very near where the epicenter of the storm went through, and well the Jersey shore has always been special to me and to my family. But during the last two or three weeks of occasional TV viewing, I have watched a few minutes of the show X Factor here and there, the show Simon Cowell decided to start after leaving American Idol. I have been mostly fascinated to see Britney Spears, talking and walking and thinking like a normal person. That has been pretty amazing. Today I even saw her being funny: there is...

Last week, I went to the doctor here at Berkeley, because my right elbow and my left shoulder have been hurting me so much it is really difficult to do all the writing I need to do. I asked the doctor about going to a chiropractor or getting acupuncture, but she launched into a big discussion of the perils of non-western medicine. She then gave me a referal to physical therapy, which did not have any appointments this month. The Icelandic medical system was not seeming so bad at this point. The doctor did however also give me a bunch of handouts about ergonomic work stations, in particular for someone like me who uses a laptop as my main working computer. And one of the major tips is to raise the computer screen up to eye level. This of course only works if you have a remote keyboard and a mouse, which I do. So the main trick was finding a good way to elevate my computer. I am delighted to report that I have enlisted Blue-y for this duty. Blue-y is the name I gave to this little...

One of my fellow graduate students at UC Berkeley is from Germany, and she lived in Iceland for a year while learning Swedish (as far as I understand it). She has recently asked me if I could start speaking Icelandic with her when we are in the office together. I don't really consider myself an appropriate person to help anyone improve their Icelandic, but at least lately I've been getting lots of pointers from my friend Unnar, so I consider myself a bit better off than I was.

I was having a great week getting revisions done on chapter 3 of my dissertation, where I am presenting my best case for why saga scholars have totally missed the mark on a huge and important part of saga narrative as it would have been received by the original recipient audience. Call me crazy, but I cannot shake the feeling that to make the sagas speak to any modern literary concerns, without first completely understanding what they did in their original milieu is, well, honestly, disrespectful. So I am trying to make strides to rectify that. So I was a bit stressed out when I received a text from my brother Thursday night informing me he was coming up to see me for the weekend. I had planned on this being a writing weekend, that is to say during the time when my son was with his father. But I could not refuse my brother, who has moved most of his stuff up to my apartment, and we are currently looking around for a new place to live. I must say it is a LOT harder than you might im...

This morning I was driving over to Palmer's house, listening to the news. They had a report about the unbelievable backlog at the Oakland Police department for processing forensic evidence. There are over 2000 samples unexamined, and a $400,000 grant they just received will barely make a dent in the problem. I thought how bizarre it is that in the state where all the CSI shows are shot and produced--and which generate a huge amount of income for the studios--that there should be so little revenue in the State coffers to do the real-life CSI investigating that needs to be done in California. There has been enough fake crime-solving in Hollywood to last 40 years, I would say. Of course my first thought was to go back to my continual gripe about Proposition 13, but I must say I have decided California's state budget problem is a lot more complicated than that. There are so many contributing factors that have brought about its death, it gets hard to pinpoint cause from effect. ...

Yesterday I finally made it out to my aunt's house in Sandgerdi, and over to Fanney's house as well. And of course everyone wanted to hear how Pálmar is doing. So I shared with Ósk my pet theory that some of Pálmar's "behavior problems" were related to issues of him trying to overcome messages from his body that he needed to sleep or eat or go to the bathroom. In other wards that his mind was always trying to control his body. Ósk, who has had health problems of her own, understood this, and sympathized with it, but also, somewhat to my surprise, also understood it as a false dichotomy created by modern Western society.  And indeed it is. We ought to listen to our body, and not fight it all the time.  I guess that is why I am not that big of a fan of the Olympics, even though it is always interesting to watch. But it is a relief when the closing ceremony finally rolls round. 

Today, a group of us got together during one of the breaks in the conference to discuss holding a material culture in the sagas workshop. I am excited about it!

I am in Aarhus now, heading out to Lindholm hoje and Fyrkat today, two famous Viking Age sites. One is a precise earthen stronghold, and the other an alluring, mysterious burial ground in use for hundreds, if not thousands of years. I will take as many pictures as I can, and try to set them in here later.

I am spending a few days in Reykjavík before flying to a conference in Denmark. Usually when I am in Iceland, I am further south, closer to the airport. So I am trying to take advantage of this rare opportunity to have a free place to stay within walking distance of the main part of Reykjavík. Last night for instance I went out (starting at midnight in good Icelandic fashion) and it was really a relief not to have to worry about how to get home safely. This morning I decided the best cure for my aching body and head was to go swimming, and it turns out the oldest public swimming pool is just across the way from where I am staying. I had heard about Sundhöll before, but never been in there, so I was pretty excited to get a chance to go. It really is an architectural gem, and extremely designed and built. The locker room area was especially nice: patrons each get there own tiny little changing room, with a key so they can just keep there stuff there. I am not used to that level of priv...

It was hard leaving my Mission Viejo yesterday, especially since my mom's arm still was not fully recovered. There was so much she couldn't do, like even fix herself a cup of coffee, when I first got there. But the day I left she was getting back some range of motion, and well I hope she will manage without me. I had to get ready for my trip to Iceland early next week, so I could do little other than bid her farewell. I also bid farewell to my friend Christine, whom I had seen nearly everyday of my trip down there. She lives here in Northern California, only about an hour away from me, but still when she was hugging me goodbye, she said we would have to get together for my birthday, which is in October. That hardly counts as planning to see each other soon, by Icelandic standards. But she's the sort of friend I don't have trouble catching back up with, even if we go years without speaking. That is the difference between a farewell and a goodbye.

Yesterday I had a meeting with the people in charge of the Norway Pavilion at Epcot Center. I told them they ought to include Iceland in some of their historic displays, since Iceland was part of the Norwegian Kingdom for a very long time. Not surprisingly, the representative Norwegian in the group was fully in favor of expanding the definition of Norway's national boundaries to its historic maximum. Hopefully Icelanders won't mind too much.

A few days ago, the graduate advisor in my department asked me one of those big "what do you want to do with your life?" sorts of questions. Usually when people asks me this I have a vague answer, kind of an Icelandic "oh we'll see what happens". But with Professor Sandberg, I thought I ought provide a bit more thorough of an answer, since he'll be directly involved with whether or not I have a position at Berkeley in the future. He also asked it in the right way I guess, because he said "Are you still planning on going into the museum field?" Somewhat to my surprise, I had a very cogent nd complete answer to this question. For a bit of background, he had written a book on museums, and his interest in museums was one of the reasons I had joined the department at Cal. So normally I have played up my interest in museums to him. But not this time. Instead I found myself saying that actually, my negative experience with museums recently, and my p...

I spent this morning with my friend Christine, whose mother passed away last month. Christine is an only child, so she has inhereted her mother's house, and has decided to sell it. So she's currently going through the house, trying to "stage it" before putting it on the market. Her mother lived I that house for 40 years, so there is a lot of stuff. It doesn't help that Chrisrine was a big fan of collectibles, and had given her mother lots of them. I think "collectibles" may be a particularly American phenomena, at least in terms of the plastic molded figurines in the shape of cats, angels, old fashioned houses, ferries, birds, children, etc. I have never encontered any of these in an Icelandic home. Or a maybe I just don't know enough 60 year old widows in Iceland.

I decided that it was better to let my son play video games rather than watch youtube postings of other people playing video games. So I bought him a Nintendo Wii game system for his birthday, which is today. It came with Super Mario Brothers, and I also bought him Kirby's Epic Yarn. My little male cousins in Iceland were not as interested in video games as kids here in the U.S. seem to be, I guess because they can just get sent outside for hours on end without supervision. We get arrested if we do that here. Anyhow, I am happy with my purchase. He is having a good time, especially with Kirby's Epic Yarn, where it is a lot harder to get killed than in Super Mario Brothers. I did something wrong in the setup, so there is no audio, but Palmer was so excited to play that he doesn't mind. I guess I will try to fix it later.

Yesterday, I was picking up a futon from a graduate student who is moving from Berkeley to New Jersey. Her name is Jessica, and although she has been working on the same floor as I have in Dwinelle Hall for the last year and half, we had never actually met before. So after I'd bought the futon from her, we got chit-chatting about the configuration of the academic departments, and how our floor, which consists of the faculty of the Scandinavian, Italian, and Slavic departments, does not integrate quite as well as one would hope. I was telling her that I frequently have conversations with another graduate student whose name I do not even know. In hopes that Jessica knew her name, I described the woman in question as having long blond curly hair and not too tall. Jessica looked at me blankly for a minute, told me the name of another student who has dark long curly hair, and I was like no, blond. So then she said, "Oh, do you mean the one who always wears make-up and whose clothes...

It sounds like Iceland is not going to be marking the transition to a new president anytime soon, even though today was an election day there. That is too bad, because transitions are a good thing. Yesterday afternoon, several of us from my department went out for beers to celebrate our own little transitional moment. The occasion was both the end of the first summer teaching session and to celebrate the fact the my classmate, Carl, accepted a teaching position at Gustavus Adolfus college in Minnesota. It seemed like a good moment then to mark the transition from the old departmental make-up, which has included Carl teaching for the last six or seven years straight, into the next phase. Another classmate of mine, Molly, started talking about other types of transitions we go through as graduate students in the Scandinavian Department at Berkeley. She recently finished her PhD qualifying exams, a process I went through in 2007. That is a grueling process of being locked in a room by ...