50/50

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...

When I lived in Reyjanesbær, I rarely took advantage of the free bus service. But now living in Walnut Creek, where only one bus route out of 50 is free, I have put considerable effort into taking advantage of what is a rare privilege. All I have to do is walk a mile and a quarter to the shopping district, where I can catch the free bus that takes me an additional mile and a quarter to the Bart station. Considering that there is a bus that stops literally right in front of my apartment building, I am being really cheap by walking to the free bus. But I am a thrifty girl at heart. Why spend money if you don't have to? I also like the free bus because people are a lot more talkative on it. Lots of locals seem to use it even though it is intended for visitors, and everyone is very chatty. Of course, they aren't talking to me, but I do sometimes listen into their conversations to entertain myself during the ride. Eves dropping was harder when I lived in Iceland, I guess because...

Have I mentioned on this blog that my cousin (3rd cousin) is Brynjar Leifsson, the band leader for Of Monsters and Men? So I am always really interested in the exposure that band is getting here in the U.S.. The song Little Talks had gotten a ton of play on a range of different stations, and now Mountain Sound is getting played on a few stations in this area. Yesterday, after Mountain Sound played, the DJ talked about how this song was from Of Monsters of Men, and how they were from Iceland. So then he asked the listeners if they could name 5 other bands from Iceland. No one could (Bjork, Sigur Ros, and Sugar Cubes) was all that they came up with. So then he said he looked it up online, and there were "63 bands in Iceland". I have no idea were a statistic of this sort could be tabulated, but I should have thought there was a lot more than 63 bands in Iceland.

American oatmeal, although packaged and advertised as a breakfast food, has so much sugar in it, it ought to be considered dessert. I did not really realize this until I, in a pinch, served American style oatmeal to a group of Icelanders who literally did not know what they were eating. In other words, it looked like oatmeal, was the same temperature and consistency of oatmeal, but did not taste a thing like what they were used to. Over the Christmas holidays, I ate a lot of oatmeal prepared the Icelandic way, and now can officially say how much better it is than the artificially sweet American version. Oats do actually have a nice hardy flavor, albeit a bit subtle, that needs just a wee bit of room on one's palette to express itself. Yet one more thing Iceland has taught me.

I start teaching as a Lecturer at Berkeley tomorrow, which has got me thinking about how that does not mean the same thing as being a Lektor at HÍ. Nor dies it mean the same thing as being a lecturer in the UK system. Apparently, the US is the only place to use that term for recent PhDs who are giving lecturers to classes, but not actually full time appointed faculty members. But it is still a promotion of sorts, or anyhow a raise, so I am happy for it. Now I just need to figure out what to do with myself after July....

Over the last two weeks, I've had a friend from Iceland staying with me, and that has led to lots of opportunities to make comparisons between California and Iceland. We spent New Years Eve in San Francisco, and Unnar was stunned by how ridiculously steep all the hills were in the city, much steeper than in Akureyri. But he was less impressed by the fireworks display at midnight, which was pretty good for an American fireworks show, but nothing at all compared to the wildness of the individual displays that take place all over Reykjavik on New Years. We took a hike on New Years day, and I was pleased to get confirmation that there is something similar between the landscape of Iceland and California. The height of the coastal hills is about the same as the mountains in Iceland, and they are both largely treeless. On a more personal note, it has been great to have someone to speak Icelandic with, and who is willing to offer corrections to me as needed. I was saying "taldi me...

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.