50/50

Almost a decade ago now, I applied for grants to go to Iceland for my PhD research. I was awarded grants from both the U.S. State department Fulbright program, and an American Scandinavian Foundation fellowship. I would not have been able to accept Icelandic citizenship under the Fullbright, so I turned it down. Jon Baldvin Hannibalsson, who was Ambassador to Iceland when I worked at the Smithsonian, is fond of introducing me to people today as the only person he knows to have turned down a Fullbright. But obviously it was more important to me to have Icelandic citizenship than it was to have a Fullbright. I didn't reflect on it much at the time, but I can psychoanalyze it now to say ego was more tied to satisfying my identity as an Icelander than to satisfying my identity as prestigious scholar. The job I have now is likely a continuation, and a reflection, of that choice. And although sometimes I regret not having the sort of pure academic position that leaves me time to write ...

I guess this term comes from Harry Houdini, who made an art out of escaping. But this could be a false etymology. Like my brother was saying last night, we often mistake phrases for things that are of more recent history. The tv show American Slang gets stuff like that wrong all the time.  I wonder if people who change jobs a lot are escape artists also. Or politicians and bankers who evade      criminal prosecution.  It doesn't seem an especially good talent, if one wishes to be considered a responsible human being. You can't be good at disappearing and also considered reliable. Not even in Iceland, I don't believe. 

I have lived in Seattle only a short while, and I'm still trying to find the Icelandic connections. I'm tracking down various leads of Icelandic settlers in the area, since according to this book http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007473805 there should be quite a  lot of Icelandic influence  in the Pacific Northwest. I haven't seen much evidence if it yet: the 17 juni celebration I went to here at the Nordic Heritage Museum had real Icelandic hotdogs but very few people who spoke Icelandic. So the community here doesn't seem to have a lot of depth to it. But as one of the places Icelandair recently started landing planes at on a regular basis, there is the chance that the Icelandic community here will become more vibrant. Nevertheless, 17 juni here will of course never rival 17 juni in Iceland. But I've been enjoying touring around the Seattle area lately. It is nice to have a travel companion who enjoys car rides and going new places, and who helps pay thing...

When I first went away to college, I think it was, I took a book with me, from off my mother's bookshelf in the kitchen. It was a book called Icelandic Lyrics by Richard Beck, published 1930. The book has a selection of poems from poets that lived between 1830 and 1930, and features the Icelandic original with facing English translation. Beck was a professor of Scandinavian Languages and Literature at the University of North Dakota. I don't think they have a professor of Scandinavian there anymore, which is a shame. It is also a shame that I have carried this book around with me for 20 years, and never really read it. I think the first time I tried, I was so disappointed by how little I understood of the Icelandic originals, and how little I liked the English translations that I put it aside. This morning, I was in the mood for poetry, and gave the book another try. So well it has taken acquiring a PhD in Icelandic literature, but I think I can finally appreciate many of these ...

I am now working at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma Washington, as the director of the Scandinavia Cultural Center. So I should probably update this blog. I just noticed it still has my vikingaheimar email on it, which doesn't work anymore. I haven't blogged in a long while, and am not sure if I'll take it back up with any earnestness now or not. I don't live in Iceland anymore, so the reason d'être of this blog no longer exists. But this morning I was thinking about something, and I thought I wanted to write it down somewhere, and I remembered I had this blog. It is the kind of thought that comes very early in the morning, after one has gone to bed early and had a long, deep sleep after lack of sleep the night before. A certain clarity of thought. Clear to me, that is, I don't know if it will make any sense to anyone else, but it makes sense to me. At my new job , I am part of the Scandinavian Area Studies program, and will occasionally teach classe...

Berkeley, as a major university on the Pacific Rim, is a very popular choice for high-achieving students from Asia, especially from South Korea, Japan, and China. Although none of them come to Berkeley to major in my home department of Scandinavian Languages and Literatures, many of them do end up taking courses in the department. This is especially the case for Scandinavian 5, which is an introduction to Scandinavian literature in translations, because it fulfills a University requirement to take a Reading and Composition course. I have been teaching Scandinavian 5 fairly consistently for the last 7 years, that is, whenever I was in Berkeley and not living in Iceland, and I have always had at least two or three international students in my class from an Asian country, in addition to the many other students of Asian ancestry who come to Berkeley as residents of California. In a class of 17 students, only two or three were typically Caucasian, and I think I only had one student ever tha...

Reynisdrengar kept us company at lunch today.

I am pretty sure this would be illegal in the US.

It is stiflingly hot here in California, so much so that I could not do anything this afternoon besides take a nap. I didn't want to go anywhere or do anything. So although I always look forward to going to Iceland, this time I am really looking forward to it. Of course this has to do with a lot more than the weather. I do not think I have taken just an honest to goodness vacation in Iceland for over a decade. I am not attending any conferences, I am not doing any contract work, and I am not even going for some family commitment, like a wedding or a funeral. No. I am going for the simple reason that I want to see those hills, taste that water, smell that air. And I want to share that experience with my son. There is no stress, there is no obligation, there is no timeline, just a remarkable sense of freedom. Which is why I am really glad to gave found a deal on a motor home to tour around. Það verður bara fulkomnir hjá okkur.

I just came back from a quick three day trip to Trondheim, Norway. I had never been there before, and had not been in Norway for over 10 years. What struck me about it immediately was how similar the material culture of Norway is to Iceland. This first occurred to me while I was in the airport at Oslo, which looks like a larger version of the Leifur Eiriksson Terminal in Keflavik. The similarity was uncanny, and at first I thought perhaps they had used the same architect. But then when I got to my hotel in Trondheim, I saw the similarity was much more pervasive, especially as it turns out in regard to bathroom design. I am now working on a hypothesis that bathrooms are the definitive cultural space. The city center in Trondheim is also really similar to Reykjavik. Although there are a few older medieval buildings there, most of the existing buildings have been built during the same period as Reykjavik, with a few old wooden buildings from the 19th century, but lots of modern conc...

Yesterday when I was waiting for the Bart train, I noticed a bee on the ground. The bee was, for lack of a better word, stumbling around. It was not able to fly, and it also seemed unble to walk in a straight line or even stay on its legs. It made me think of the articles I have read about bee colony collapse, the mysterious circumstance where bees suddenly stop retuning to the hive. The latest I have read about it is that it is caused by something going wrong with the bees sense of direction, such that although the bees want to get home to the hive, they cannot find their way back. And without the nourishment of the honey, they all start to die. What is causing this navigational failure is still uncertain--cell phone transmissions for instance have been offered as one explanation. But yesterday I was sure it was caused by another culprit I've heard mentioned: pesticides. After this thought occurred to me, I spent the rest of the train ride imagining a book written two hundred ye...

I have a neighbor named Beverly, a petite African American woman in her late 50s or 60s, who works with handicapped adults. She is a humble, kind, and extremely genuine human being. Sometimes I see her walking to the train station early in the morning, and I give her a ride. When my brother is here, he does the same thing. When I went out of town for a week over Christmas, she watched my three cats for me. She is a really good neighbor. When I lived in Iceland, I remember feeling ill at ease with most of the people living in the same block as me (except of course my friend Ko-leen). I never had any idea what I was supposed to talk to them about, and I resented the feeling that they knew more about who I was and what I was doing in Reykjanesbær than I knew about them. I was trained by the American suburban living experience of the 1980s, where one does one's best to never speak to the neighbors unless there is an entirely practical and logical reason to do so. Perhaps my time in...

Today the course I am teaching, Scandinavian 123, begins the final section of the course, which I titled "Transformations" when I made up the syllabus. I just noticed that I put the topics in a really random order on the original syllabus, but hope my student's will appreciate my efforts to fix that with an amended syllabus today. One of the challenging things about teaching this section is trying to decide how exactly to explain how Viking raiders turned into Medieval Christians. Models of cultural change generally depend on a diffusion model--i.e. that Scandinavians saw how things were done in mainland Europe and then copied it--based on some sort of idea of logical progression and rational human preference for more efficient systems. Such an explanation is largely unsatisfying, in as much as most cultural systems are neither that logical nor that permeable. So first one has to assume that Viking culture was somehow perceived as insufficient before one can hypothesize...

About two years ago, the head of Framsóknarflokkurinn, Sigmundur Davið, said he was going on a "Viking diet", which meant to him a diet in which one only ate meat and dairy. This annoyed me, since it was based on some sort of stereotype of the barbaric Viking that ought not be floating around Iceland, of all places. The real diet of late Iron age Scandinavians ("Vikings") was not low carb: first of all they drank a ton of beer, and secondly, they ate plenty of bread. So I am not on a Viking diet. I am however on a low carb diet, which means I have stopped eating bread or other starches (potatoes, corn, rice). Basically, no white fluffy food. This has been working pretty well for me, although this morning I stopped by a cafe and ordered an omelet for breakfast that I was not too pleased with. Not only did it take a long time, was clearly microwaved, and had a slice of American cheese on top (which isn't really cheese at all, it is a "cheese like product...

Unlike many of my intellectual friends, I go to church on Easter Sunday. It is an important part of my life, and a tradition I plan to keep up and pass on to my son. This year my son and I went to a small community church in Moraga. They were really friendly and happy we attended.

It was the summer of 2008 when it started. First it was just a little hint that something might be starting to come loose, and then one day, while eating an Icelandic pylsur, it happened. The false tooth that had been cemented in place since I was 16 popped out. A few months later, the same tooth on the other side fell out. Thus began a very long process that is culminating today in a 2 hour visit to the dentist's office. At first I tried to salvage the teeth the dentist of my youth had given me, and while I was living in Iceland, that seemed to work pretty well. The dentist in Keflavik did a great job cementing the tooth on the right back in place, but was not so successful with the one on the left. It fell out again a few months later, unfortunately while I was having lunch at the Culture House in Reykjavik. An archaeologist 400 years from now may find it underneath the floor boards; I however could not. So then I went to the dentist I had through the Coast Guard insurance...

One of the coolest events I went to when I lived in Iceland was the University of Iceland's humanities departments' annual open house/ conference. I have never heard of any U.S. university doing anything similar. It is free, and you get to hear talks by professors and students presenting their research for the year. I missed it this year, and last, and the year before that. I hope the people who went there enjoyed it, and appreciated what a special thing it is to have such an honest and straight-forward exchange of ideas.

When I was living in Iceland, there was some talk about putting in a rail line between Reykjavík and the Keflavík, or more specifically, to the airport. This did not strike me as a bad idea, despite the earthquake/lava flow technical difficulties of such an enterprise. But it reminded me a bit of the piecemeal approach to the rail system in California. The great state of California does not have a highspeed rail system, and even the old diesel train system is a huge disappointment. One line extends to Bakersfield and the next line does not start until Fresno, so people have to take a bus in between. Using this system, it takes something like 18 hours to get from San Diego to San Francisco, in comparison to 8 hours driving. So that sucks. There is now finally a proposal on the books to try to make a continuous, modern rail line from northern to southern California, and to say it is hightime this be pursued would be a massive understatement. On the other hand, the Bay Area has had a we...

On Sunday I got an email invitation from the Icelandic American Association about a special free concert, featuring Icelandic musicians paired with German musicians, who will play some experimental music from students at Stanford's music school. How exactly an arrangement of this sort came to be made is anyone's guess, but I plan on going. First of all because I like weird music, secondly because I will go to just about anything at Stanford I can since I love that area, and thirdly because it has an Icelandic connection. It is upcoming this Friday, and I am looking forward to it. Maybe I will even get a chance to figure out how all of this came about.

Last night, the Icelandic-American Association of Northern California had its Þorrablót celebration, which I think technically makes it a few days too late, since the full moon a few days ago would have marked the end of the month of Þórri if I understand things correctly. The Association had gotten in the habit of having the celebration a bit late, so that a chef could be brought from Iceland to do a proper Þorrablót for all of us recalcitrant Icelanders living here in the Bay Area. But this year they had no such excuse, since the Association decided not to have an Icelandic chef and band on hand for the occasion. Instead we met at the Norwegian Men's Club, which is a cool row house at Golden Gate Park, beautifully decorated and set up, with a bar in the basement and pool tables on the 4th floor. (The only problem with this place, which I have blogged about before, is that it is exclusively a men's club, so little old me is only allowed in when there is an Icelandic Associ...