50/50

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 ...

Yesterday the Supreme Court of the U.S. made a ruling on what had been called the most monumental case in U.S. history, though surely that was a slight exaggeration. It was anyhow on all the news outlets constantly for the last several weeks, and  when the actual case was being heard back in the spring, it was covered like the O.J. Simpson trial. So the entire U.S. has been focused on this court case for the better part of six months, no joke. For Icelanders, it might be hard to imagine just how important this court case was for Americans. On the legal side, it was ruling on a small technicality of the law that, if overturned, would have put in jeopardy a whole slue of Federal government policies. The reason for this is that to overturn this law, the court would have had to rule that the Federal government was not allow to impose taxes for anything that was not strictly financial (commerce) in nature. This would have put all sorts of government incentives--everything from environ...

Included in the package of Icelandic hotdogs I was sent were two bags of Icelandic candy called kúlu-súkk. This is a very clever name for a very yummy candy. A kúla being something small and round, and súkk being an English borrowing for the verb suck, which works well for chocolate-covered balls of soft licorice that melt in your mouth with just the barest salty aftertaste. It is also a clever name because it is very similar to the name of a town on the east coast of Greenland, Kulusuk, where flights departing Iceland for Greenland often land. So it is a bit exotic and unknown, reachable and yet removed. I have never been to Kulusuk, but now I kind of want to.

American academic essay writing is different than Icelandic in a lot of little ways. I notice this often, since I teach the American style but read a lot of Icelandic essays. Basically this means I am mentally editing all the Icelandic essays I read to conform more to the American system. Right now I am trying to teach my students, most of whom are Asian, the American essay writing style. One of the biggest challenges with the American essay is coming up with a good beginning. One that isn't too dramatic or over stated (ie: since the beginning of time man has sought the truth of the universe) because that is just forced and inauthentic and too much pressure for one little college essay.

In order to get hotdogs from Iceland for the 17th of June Icelandic Independence Day Celebration, a fairly complex network of people became involved. And it reminded me of just how much more interconnected Icelanders are with one another, than Americans. Here, if you want to get something done, you have to do it according to specified channels. There isn't a network of subtle relationships interconnecting all Americans. There are family, friends, and business relations, but not 50 people who fulfill all of those roles at once floating around. So in a way, even though there are less Icelanders, each one is capable of getting more done. Like getting hotdogs halfway around the world for no cost on five days notice.

This weekend, the Icelandic American Association of Northern California is going to be celebrating 17 júni at a park north of San Francisco. Somewhat ironically, it is going to be held at the Sons of Norway lodge, but once you get over on this side of the ocean differences between the Nordic countries get a little fuzzy. But I have insisted on one little bit of purity. If I am going to eat a hotdog at a 17 júni barbeque, it has to be an Icelandic hotdog. No approximation of it, nothing similar, no high-grade American dog, nothing but a real íslensk pylsur will do. So far there are still some details of this plan up in the air, but I shall keep you updated.