50/50

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...

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.