Rasma says...

Mother's Day

2012-02-12T13:55:00.003+01:00

It is not easy being a mother
and having to spend the day in bed
with crumbs and dripped tea
and bed socks.

And love. What is mother-love
that is not guilt-ridden, guilt-
driven, duty-bound, pillar-strong
like Heaven.

Here. Let your daughters
show you, not the way
to Heaven but around; it is
love of the mother-sort
unearned.

And learned. Look, how
little you still know - what is
the crossword clue for unlettered,
unskilled, unlearned? Once
it was all you knew.

The ignorant is always cloaked
in the know-it-all. Erase your pencil marks.
Return to blank. Let your daughters
teach you how to love.

Advice for the End of January

2012-01-28T19:31:00.010+01:00

Don't leave the Christmas decorations out so long,
they will only multiply and spread to the corners
of the living room where you will not recognize them
in the glare of the ball of fire that hovers an inch
above the horizon and shoots yellow rays and beams into
the corners and crannies you had forgotten you owned,
exposing the coat of textured paint that is really the dust
of neglect that falls each year with the snow and the dark of winter.

Candlesticks that spell out J U L, a tin of holly, tissue
paper and boxes that have moved with you from house
to house, continent to continent, await your attention
but it should have been done in the dark, this deed of
mantling and dismantling Christmas, not in this daylight
of the new year when the sun glows, then peeks, then one day
rises, a molten quivering orange orb that makes you rise too
from your desk and go out the door and stand in front of the red brick
wall of the school and stare with your colleague, a man
who never stops talking, but now he does. There it is.
The sun is back. And no sooner have you said these words
than the disc of gold is gone, sliding to its left, behind the mountain,
as if on wheels, or drawn by a pulley, or slipping on its own
oily yellow-glow trail.

The sun moves sideways, you never knew this, sideways along
the horizon, left to right, you feel the ring it is prescribing around
you, like a ribbon, like bondage, like the tie you wind around a
box at Christmas. Along the horizon it glides and you follow its
appearance, after the twelfth day of jul it is a glow, then its rays flash
like mirrored messages, then one day a round appears, like the tip of a breast,
then more, like a shoulder, until one day it is there, suspended in the nothing
of sky and a young girl says, I see the sun, the real sun, the round one!
and when you get home your love describes how she turned her chair to the window
and watched four sunrises. And four sunsets. Before the darkness came again.

It is all you can do in January, keep track of the sun. There should be
no Christmas remains, garish and exposed and wrong of season. With
each lengthening day they are more cast in the shadows of a light
that won't let you find decoration anywhere else.

To Blog or Not to Blog

2011-10-02T11:54:00.003+02:00

or where or when or how

or why

for whom

what format

what formål

it used to be that I would lie in bed in the morning, unable to get up until I had visualized what outfit I was going to put on to go to school...

... and then I got over that, moved on, matured, got an identity that was transferrable to many outfits,

got enlightened

and then this array of display options for every little alphabetic squirt I emit

akk
argg
æsj

going back in time, unplugging

closing the closet

going back

to bed turning

off

the light

Rememberances, East Tennessee

2011-10-01T14:51:00.002+02:00

It's always unsettling to receive a one-line email that is not part of an on-going email conversation you are having with someone. Especially when that email is from a stranger. A stranger who calls you by your name. Correctly. Then you know something is up.

I have the advantage of having a name that confounds posers. Dear Mr. Haidri, Dear Hadr Rahsm, Congratulations Sylvia Rasma! These configurations always alert me to spam even before I see the sender is trying to sell me a penis enlarger or inform me how to retrieve my winnings from the Nigerian national lottery. Even in pre-internet days the post that wasn't really post was easy to identify by the muddled presentation of my name.

But the one-line email had my name correct. It came right to the point. Rasma, I am the daughter-in-law of Ann Nygard of Tennessee, USA. If you are the same Rasma whose photos and correspondence I found in her papers, please contact me.

Gulp. Of course I am.

Ann and Mike Nygard were the parents of my sister's cast-off boyfriend who became my first boyfriend. I was fourteen and he was nineteen. Ann and Mike were always nice and kind and friendly to me, and I think they were glad when my parents moved me north to Wisconsin, putting a certain distance between me and their son who was basically of a different generation if not culture.

I remember a conversation he had with my mother one day standing underneath the redwood deck of our fieldstone and cedar split-level ranch in Wiltshire Estates. It went something like this:

Mother: "Rasma is going to the UNIVERSITY."
Boyfriend: "Well ma'yam, with all dew ruhspect, whon sheeis feefteen sheekun dew whashee whans."

I was standing there, barefoot as I recall, with a slight inkling that she was more right than he was. But he was born-again and my mother wasn't, so he had the authority of God on his side. I wondered what would become of me. Neither of them asked my opinion on the subject.

Ann and Mike liked me, but discouraged their son from following me north. He did though. When he was twenty-one he got in the car and drove some two thousand miles through five states and showed up on my parents' doorstep dressed in a suit and tie. I wasn't a great communicator, pathologically reticent and afraid of disappointing others. Yet I got the message across that with two years of high school left I had no intention of marrying him. Maybe I dared to tell him I had fallen for the boy with the smiling eyes who had lent me $5 the first day of school to pay my book fees and was now teaching me to drive a stick-shift in his green Volkswagon bug. I had a new future, a northern future. I remember him standing at our black dial-up wall phone and saying into the receiver, "Maw-maw, yoowus righ, yee-ehs mawmaw, sheesayd no." He got off the phone and grinned at me. "My mawmaw tollme nutta come, but I jess haydu try." Then he got into his black sedan and drove south again.

A few years later, when I was not much older than twenty-one myself, I visited Ann and Mike with the man that I did marry. We were on a tour of the South, the year Knoxville, Tennessee hosted the World's Fair. My former boyfriend was there. He was married, or had been married. There was some kind of scandal that Ann told me about. His wife run off with the meter reader, or something like that. We were all standing around in the kitchen and he grinned at his mother, keeping an eye on my husband, and saying, "Maw-maw whoosee favuh?" I was confused as to why he was questioning my husband's political leanings. And why would Ann know who my husband favored? "I dunno son," she said, but he kept grinning and asking. "Cumon whoosee favuh?" I suddenly got that he meant "who does he look like" when he named someone and Ann agreed. I had been away from the south so long that I had forgotten the language.

We had a nice afternoon with the Nygards and that was the last I saw them. But yes, I must have sent some pictures over the years, and I do remember that Ann and I exchanged some letters. Both of these things would have remained forgotten if not for the sudden ominous presence of the one-line email in my "contact from rasma.org" mailbox.

Please contact me.

I send a confirmation of my identy, and figure that I would hear in return that Ann is dead and they want to send me my letters and pictures. One day goes by. Nothing. On the second day I get an email that contains a large picture of Ann sitting in an easychair, smiling, covered with a patchwork quilt that has apparently come out of the Happy Birthday bag that is on the floor by the chair.

Time seems to have stood still, because Ann looks exactly the way she did that day in her kitchen with her son saying Maw-maw whoosee favuh? Amazing!

The email from her daughter-in-law is longer this time. She informs that Ann is 84 and has Alzheimers, so she remembers the long-ago past more vividly than anything else. "When I visit Ann in the nursing home I will ask her about you to see if she has a remembrance."

I am standing on a dot on one side of the globe, near the north-pole. Rotate the earth backwards and find a dot on the other side. It is a nursing home in east Tennessee where I am a topic of conversation. The mention of me brings hope and satisfaction. My name and antics are associated with health and longevity. I was found, excavated from the dresser drawers of a soft-spoken woman who was always smiling and always liked me, like a mother. She wasn't my mother or my mother-in-law, but she kept rememberances of me in her desk drawer for the next generation to find and wonder: who is that?

I am amazed and flattered. And undeserving. A bony brown-skinned girl, last seen at 15, or 21. And valued for a lifetime.

There is a poem here, my writer's group would have said. They might have helped me find it. Alone, I have only an inkling of it. Awe and wonder. Yes, there is a poem here. But I don't know what it is.

Little squeaky children voices

2011-09-14T20:26:00.004+02:00

They are running clockwise around the yard across the road, paired up with their legs bound together. It is Maria's birthday. Maria of the white house below ours that is an unavoidable feature of all my panorama shots of the fjord and mountain range.

For years, perhaps until just this year, the seasons were marked by the appearance, disappearance and reappearance of Maria's trampoline. Each spring her father lugged out the giant black disk, blue canvas and iron poles to assemble the thing and when frost threatened took it all down again. The first year Maria herself was involved in hammering together the set of wooden steps that would enable her to climb onto it. I wonder if this year Maria told her dad she is too big for the trampoline. Too busy playing football. Too often away at someone else's house. She is maybe eleven now. I just glanced out the window and the kids huddled beneath the trees look like their own parents. They are broad shouldered, their jackets size X-large. Maria has always been big for her age, physically and otherwise. When we first got Hector she would come over and hang out to watch him in the yard. One day she said something to Veronica about "the woof woof". Woof woof? what kind of a word is that, Veronica asked. Without a pause Maria put her hand on Veronica's shoulder and in a confiding if not apologetic tone said, "You know how it is: small children, small words..." She was probably 7 then. Maybe she is about 11 now?

I remember my 11th birthday. I had strong notions about what I absolutely had to have as a present. It must have been a fairly prosperous moment for my father as I was allowed to make a request. I ended up making two because I just couldn't choose between my obsessions. One was a matchbox car set (figure 8 track with a wire spring running through it; little plastic pins taped onto the bottom of the cars stuck into the spring and it pulled the cars around the track). This was pre Hotwheels, which my brothers got a year or so later. I disdained Hotwheels for their flashy fake orange track and wannabe race cars that were so compact you couldn't see inside the door. Matchbox cars were elegant, classy, full-detailed miniatures. They came in all sorts of intricate models, everything from a firetruck to a Jaguar. My other obsession, which I also received along with the Matchbox car set that year, was a Dick Tracy BB-gun. Flat, black, square... yes, exactly like the one Dick Tracy held in the cartoon strip. Oh, it was a beautiful thing. Came in a red cardboard box. The heft of the BBs, which in my mind's eye were brass. Could they have been?

Age 11 was a good birthday. I coveted and I received. And nobody told me a girl couldn't have race cars and BB guns. And nobody told me I couldn't have both, if I wanted both. Yes, it was a good June that one. Now the screeching yelping excited voices of children fill the neighborhood. It is a sound I recognize. Only yesterday my own children had just such squeaky little voices. And the day before it was me playing at Ponderosa with Cathy Christmas, galloping around on a pony named Bullet, my Dick Tracy gun brandished high to ward off (or was it to attract?) the imagined threat of feral dogs and rabid possums. Which was about all we worried about that day.

Dawn musings: the design of fathers and music boxes.

2011-09-03T16:55:00.003+02:00

A moment ago the rays of rising sun were spotlighting a photo on my wall, making a vignette of my mother standing behind the chair of my father who is holding Kazi in his lap. It reminds me of a poem about my father. Or is it about my mother?

The Last Photograph of My Father

My daughter is in his lap

like a bouquet of flowers.

Like the bouquet that would

come to the door from a friend

three days later.

But that is not the miracle.

The miracle is my mother

who appeared uninvited,

who walked across the room

and stood by his chair, though no one

would have asked her to do this.

Not because she did not belong,

but my mother refuses to be in pictures,

Turns her head, covers her face, scowls.

Even on a wedding photograph she is waving

an angry arm at the photographer.

In one teenage photo she tries to strangle

her kid brother with the camera.

So no one asks my mother to be in pictures.

This photo was to be of my daughter and father,

but she got up and crossed the room unbidden,

positioned herself in the center behind him

and though unpracticed, she smiled,

as if she knew she belonged there,

as if she heard his heart

counting down.

Either way, it is gone now. The sun. Filling someone else’s 6 a.m. window, the gloria spotlighting something else with meaning.

Because I was up at 5 with the dog, and because I went to bed after midnight with the dog, I am falling asleep while writing this. That heavy-head-eyelid-drop that often hits me when writing. But before I got so sleepy, and before the sun left to go play at someone else’s house, another object on my desk was illuminated. My mother’s black handled magnifying glass. Its circumference measures more than the breadth of my palm. The convex center is a mess of scratches, and it is these I find myself thinking about. Wondering if today somone could polish them away. Not today but “these days.”

In all the time I grew up with the magnifying glass it was scratched. I do remember my mother trying to use it to read small print. The fact that it was broken and not really usable didn’t lead to it being gotten rid of. Broken was the condition of many if not most things, a state of affairs we accepted as our due.

Three things belonged to the same group: the silver handstapler, the magnifying glass, the blue and green glass ashtray. They were mom. If I keep the magnifying glass on my desk, it is because we share a past. That black handled implement knew my mother in a way I never did, and because it belonged to her it has not occured to me to throw it out. Or is it because I have inherited her habit of not throwing things out that I keep it on my desk, as useless as ever.

If mom was solid practical objects like the stapler, magnifying glass and ashtray, Dad was a myriad of contradictions: a prayer rug, onyx ring, golden dental bridge, Allah on his arm in a blue tattoo. The one thing of my fathers that I longed to find in his house after he died was his black cigarette-cum-music-box. It stood about ten inches high, brass knob on top, five lacquered doors with gold inlay (or so I fancied). A key on the bottom wound it up. As it rotated to a sprightly melody the five doors swung open to serve cigarettes from little pockets behind each one. Winding up and watching an instrument like that, indeed collecting such items of quirky beauty and demonstrating them for people like me, filled my dad with childlike glee.

The music-cigarette-box was not in his house at the end.

I hope it is a source of joy for whoever has it. Or, if it has been destroyed and no longer exists, that my brief and inept description of it here contributes to it being remembered by those who have seen it, or one like it (for it surely wasn’t unique), back in the days (40s? 30s?) when the elegance of music, design, and cigarettes was one. I wasn't there, but my dad was. He didn't smoke, but my mom did. They would have been her cigarettes in the little doors of the music box.

My dad smoked a pipe, and I did find one of those in his house after he died. Still have it, nearly twenty years on, on my little shelf of treasures. Another item I found was a sign hanging in the hallway, artistically lettered in his own hand: Thou Shalt Not Smoke Until Cremated. That’s the kind of thing he found hilarious, both as a provocation to his muslim upbringing and a darned good play on words.

The sign was as close to a last will and testament we could find in the rubble and chaos that was his house. My father’s brother rejected the suggestion (made by my mother via me) that my father be cremated. To him anything short of a muslim burial would leave his brother's spirit wandering the earth in endless unrest. So we had the muslim burial: men only service, cardboard box coffin, white cotton shroud, all the teeth pulled, consecrated muslim burial ground in another state. That was the first, but not the last, time that I heard my father speak to me after he died, his voice as clear and real and full of childlike enthusiasm as when he first placed the black lacquered box on the table and called me over saying, Honey, come and look!

Oh honey, it does not matter, he said, his voice almost cheerful as I stood over his body that lay on the floor before a sea of genuflecting strangers, all madly praying for his soul. There was a twinkle in his voice. The scene held the kind of complex irony he took pleasure in generating. Cremated or buried in a box, no matter.

For all the wisdom he had attempted to impart to me as a child, these were the first words, father-to-daughter, the only words I ever really heard. Or needed to hear. It took a lifetime, but in that moment I finally knew that he was my father. And I smiled at the irony along with him. All this hullabalu, and here he wasn’t even dead at all.

The next thing he showed me, in a dream a few nights later, was his house, unrecognizable as the one with the squalor and chaos and no-smoking-till-cremated sign. I moved through its many rising stories, each gleaming, golden, full of oak and sunlight, swept and polished and clean, empty of unnecessaries and rubbish, but containing a few select items of beauty. He showed me the polished walnut server, beautiful, sorted and in place. There was nothing for me to take care of, no burden, no mess.

If the black lacquered cigarette-music-box was in that house, I didn’t see it. Chances are it was gone, its purpose served, and like my father it had moved on.

A Word about Elements

2011-08-24T07:52:00.001+02:00

Ah, the lime and green-tomato taste of Kristiansand on my toast. I am slowly working my way through the jars of marmalade in the cellar. We don’t have a cellar, but it seems like the word one wants to say about jams and jellies that have been put up… is that the right word? It seems “put up some jam” is a phrase from summer on the farms with Aunt Barbara or Lucille. Although with Barbara it was “put up some pickles.” Lucille made strawberry jam, the kind with a layer of white wax underneath the lid to make it seal. To be the one that opened the jar first meant sticking your finger down the side of the wax and scooping it out so that you got to lick jam from both the bottom of the wax seal and your finger. The strawberries were from Lucille’s back yard, a fact that impressed me as nothing short of a miracle. That, and the bouquets of flowers she put in vases and set around the house, flowers that grew in her “flower patch.” Setting the table for lunch might include getting silverware out of the drawer and flowers from the garden. It awed me more than anything either of my own parents ever did. Except maybe when I was even younger and my dad would make balloons stick to the ceiling by rubbing them on his head first.

Now I have more flower gardens than most people could ever dream of, especially on a small house lot. The bit of grass that we have to mow is about the dimension of a good sized living room throw rug. Everything else is flowers, thanks to Veronica. And she put up the jam too, which is why it tastes of Kristiansand. A fragrance of that year, that windy dark autumn of southern balm.

It isn’t quite autumn here yet, but today I saw the sun rise on the mountain face and that is a sign of the coming darkness. For months now we haven’t seen the sun rise because it is just always there in the sky, circling overhead. The sun rising is a sign of the coming dark time, and so is the start of school, which was yesterday for me, meaning when my first classes met.

I was very apprehensive, nervous about the first year class which contained a fair number of Bia’s former classmates, including her childhood best friend. Suddenly I could not just swoop into the classroom on the first day and blow them away by the novelty of my approach. These kids knew me, knew of me at least, and my daughter would be implicated in my impending ineptness. I simply did not want to teach first year, but the administration couldn't honor that request. I got two first year classes, one in letters & science and one in health & social services.

The hour of reckoning came yesterday at 10 o’clock. I had prepared as best I could, but felt no more confident for that. Yet when I got into the classroom something clicked and it seemed for a moment that I was in water, aware that this is what swimming felt like... I remembered I knew how when I saw that I was doing it. This is what being in one’s element means, I thought, and it was a sentient understanding of that phrase. As my former pupil Aksel was fond of saying: it went swimmingly.

It went swimmingly, my first day of school with the students. Now to finish my tea (chai rather, strong and black, brewed with cardamom, ginger and cloves) and toast that tastes of another place, another element, a time when having flower gardens and a basement full of homemade jam was only a wish. Today, there is nothing left to wish for. It’s all here. I am submerged in it. This thing called life.

Sure it’s a cliché. But sometimes you get to experience a fleeting encounter with the extraordinary moment that gave birth to the cliché.

22-7-11

2011-08-22T02:05:00.000+02:00

Now the commemoration ceremony has marked the official close of the first phase of post-22-7 mourning. The beginning of the other. The first phase was disbelief vying with belief, the second will be everything else.

I remember being strongly convinced back in the 90s that the worst possible fate would be to outlive a child. Children are supposed to grieve the loss of parents as each generation edges forward in time, the adult child becoming at last only adult as the old bones that bore them are buried. The opposite, a parent burying a child, is a perversion of this order, the loss of a generation, a reversal in time. To sit back at this time of year without your teenager fussing over the start of school, no lunches to worry about, no juggling of busy schedules, no waiting up on weekends to make sure they are safely home... leaves a calm and lack of chaos in daily life that no parent would ask for.

But what did I know? I cannot even remember what precipitated that strong feeling. Maybe Ellen Kort's poem "If Death Were A Woman" written after her 20-something year old son drowned in Lake Michigan. He was going boating with a friend but arrived late and the friend was already out on the lake. Ellen's son lay on the horn of his car until the friend finally noticed and came back, and fetched him, and they went out again, and drowned. He lay on the horn, said Ellen. That is how determined he was to go out there.

She meant to meet his fate. Moslems believe that you are predestined to die at a particular moment in time. When a tunnel collapsed in Mecca killing 4,000 pilgrims at one fell swoop, this idea was illustrated in caricature. That was also in the 90s. As was the death of my father and my mother. As was my own rebirth in the ocean when I felt I had gotten to live two lifetimes without having to die in between. In the 90s I learned about the

Dirge Without Music

2011-08-14T08:30:00.004+02:00

Leserbrev ti Avisanordland

2011-08-13T12:38:00.001+02:00

Det er med vantro jeg leser Amund Garfors innlegg (Tanker etter 22. juli 2011, AN 6.08.11) hvor han synes å hevde at eneste måten å forstå at “en etnisk nordmann kan meie ned og drepe ungdommer, barn og kvinner, og som oppholder seg på en sommerleirer” er enkelt og greit at Ap "har åpnet opp landet for islam og masseinnvandring av muslimer”.

Går det an å fraskrive Behring Breivik ansvar for hans egen tilsynelatende psykopatiske udåd og legge det på “de ansvarlige politikerne i alle partier, og som sitter med ansvar...” Hva for et ansvar? Hvis etterkrigstidens sosiopolitiske utvikling har hovedansvar, ja til og med delansvar, for at Behring Breivik handlet som han gjorde, hvor er alle de andre som vokste opp under samme innflytelse og i forutsigbart likhet med ham har blitt til psykopatiske massemorderne?

Om innvandringshistorien hadde vært en annen ville Behring Breivik vært en ordentlig samfunnsborger, kanskje en ekte småbruksbonde som brukte gjødsel bare til ansvarlige formål, eller til og med en ungdomsbeskyttende politimann som bar sin uniform i ordentlig Kardemommebystil?

Hvem vet, men jeg tipper ei.

Samfunnsdebatt er sundt, og jeg takker Brigt Kristensen og Tormod J. Karlsen for belysende innlegg i samme avis, men jeg mener at en grov politisering av saken gir Behring Breivik en ufortjent stemme i denne debatten. Gjerningsmannens handling og framgangsmåte viser ham for den han er: en patetisk hvis ikke sinnsyk feiging, som vil mene noe om regjeringen og Kongen, men tør bare møte opp til konflikt med de mest forsvarsløse, utkledd som det strik motsatt av den han er. Han fortjener ikke den politiske innflytelse og makt Garfors' argumentasjon gir ham.

Hvis Behring Breivik ønsket å åpne for en politisk revolusjon, ville han blitt bedre tjent med å møte opp på Utøya ærlig utkledd som den han er, med mikrofon og ikke gevær i hånden. Etnisk nordmann eller ikke, det hadde han imidlertid ikke mot til å gjøre.

Flowers for Utøya

2011-08-13T12:30:00.001+02:00

The first thing that strikes you when watching the evening news is that Utøya is shaped like a heart.

It becomes its own symbol, a memorial ground, even though all the dead have been retrieved and the heart shaped dot of land is empty, strewn with brightly colored camping tents abandoned in media res.

If it were any other context, the other picture on the evening news would make you howl with laughter. It is the miscalculation that made the police from Oslo drive out of their way to get to the island.

The police were directed to take this route via Storøya... instead of this shortcut from Utvika.

There was only one rubber boat awaiting the troopers at Storøya. Overloaded with a dozen or more police in riot gear, the rubber raft came to a halt midway to Utøya. Luckily many boaters were already actively picking up people, dead and alive, from the water. A motorboat came to the rescue of the police. On the video we see three people in the rubber raft and a small army of police in the motorboat after the exchange.

The Oslo police were publically shamed, but the local Buskerud police only had one rubber raft. Someone was nervous and confused, as police ought not to be, when telling the Oslo police who pulled up to Utvika that there was no way to get to Utøya from there. Helicopter TV cameras show several vacationing motorboats docked there. But we are not a state that expects disaster. Our policemen do not routinely carry guns.

The detour cost the police between 15 and 20 minutes.

Behring Breivik claims now that he called the police himself to tell them he was ready to hand himself over, the damage was extensive enough, now his manifesto would get the attention it deserved. He called ten times. The police answered two of the times. He asked for a confirmation call that the message had been delivered to someone in charge.

The police never called him back.

As soon as the police showed up on the island the sharpshooter put down his gun. Before that, he was shooting about one person a minute. Single shots. Thus he has also achieved a world record for the number of deaths done by single shots of a rifle in one massacre.The detour to Storøya and debacle in the rubber raft had deadly consequences, but it is unlikely that heads will roll because of it. Norway is not of the mindset that finding someone to blame and punish alleviates the aftermath of a crime.

Anders Behring Breivik attacked the Labor Party Youth Camp because these were the future leaders of the Labor Party. Labor has been governing Norway off and on (but more on than off) since WWII ended and Norway’s happy fairytale called OIL began. Behring Breivik wanted to disable the party, because liberal immigration policies since the 1980s have made Norway a more multicultural nation. Foreign immigrants account for about 12% of the population today.

The trick worked in that more people know about his manifesto today. After all, he did not go the route of mainstream politics to try to enact the change he wanted. Rather, he was content to be an internet chatroom pundit whose unchecked isolation and ideology led him to take extreme measures in order to attract an audience for his cause. His plan backfired. The labor party has, if anything, been strengthened by this atrocity.

The symbol of the labor party is the rose. After 22 July Norway ran out of roses. People were buying them by the hundreds to lay down at memorial demonstrations in towns and bergs and cities all over the country. At first I heard that the price of roses skyrocketed in response to the demand. Typical market exploitation. But then the opposite happened. Norway lifted its import tax so roses could be shipped into the country from all over Europe more cheaply than ever. There would be no shortage of roses to commemorate the dead.

Fifteen to twenty thousand people demonstrated in Bodø. That’s about half the population. Two hundred thousand in Oslo. Each person clutching a handful of roses. The labor party’s approval rate has skyrocketed under PM Stoltenberg's display of leadership, humility, compassion and good-neighborliness. He has attended and spoken at many of the funerals of the victims, most of them between 15 and 25 years old. His cabinet or other leading figures, such as Gro Harlem Bruntland or the crown prince, have shown up at others. Every night on the news there is a recap of the day's funerals. On the roofs of medieval churches big screens broadcast the service because there is not enough room for everyone who wants to attend.

At one funeral of a bubbly fifteen-year-old who called herself bubbles, the attendees brought bottles of soap and blew bubbles by the hundreds after the service. Everyone wore white instead of black to celebrate her exhuberance. At another, Chris Medina showed up at the family’s request and sang "What are Words,"because the last thing the girl had done with her mother was to show her a video of that song. Each funeral becomes a sort of resolution, if not a celebration. The country is in mourning, but not in shell shock. It is conducting itself with dignity, as I wish George Bush had had the wherewithall to do after 9-11. Instead of calling for revenge, people are calling for dialog. We are in a state of proactive outrage.

Some morons are indeed saying that the labor party’s politics have ruined the country through liberal immigration and even going so far as to claim that the government is to blame for driving Behring Breivik to do what he did. After all, an “ethnic Norwegian” would never do such a thing if it weren’t necessary.

Many more voices are saying no. They want more politics like Stoltenberg’s. They want more compassion and togetherness. More roses filling the streets. There are local elections coming up in September, but the parties have all agreed to not campaign at this time. After the national memorial service next weekend, in which the survivors of Utøya will be brought back to the island one day, and the families of the victims the next, political campaigning will resume during the few short weeks before elections.

I think more eyes than ever will be on that election. I read somewhere that an 80% turnout is expected. I will be surprised if Framskritspartiet (the Tea Party-ish political wing that Behring Breivik belonged to when he was a teenager) gets as much support as they would have if Utøya had never happened. Politics were heading toward the right, but now even the opposition party leader has apologized for the way she has spoken about immigrants ruining the country. It seems to me that by the deaths of so many young people politics has matured, grown up, become more relevant and viable than ever. I was glad to see my voting card arrive in the mail.

So thank you Anders Behring Breivik. I think that in managing the opposite of your intent, you have propelled the country forward as a beacon of democracy and peace in the world. All your hate is pulverized underfoot as a steadfast nation surges into its streets carrying roses.

Still, one of the first poems I loved comes to mind. I was 15 or 16 when these words resonated in my head as the most beautiful ever written. I quoted this in the government’s online condolence book, and I’ll put it here as well. From Edna St Vincent Millay’s “Dirge without Music”:

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the

laughter, the love, —

They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses.

Elegant and curled

Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know.

But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all

the roses of the world.

Last Days of Summer (?)

2011-08-09T13:58:00.002+02:00

Here I sit surrounded by sweetpeas with a cup of chai and a brilliant sun reflecting off the fjord and mountains. It is Tuesday, already less than a week until I have to be at school for my first meetings. Two weeks from yesterday the students will be in their places and we'll be on our way to finishing the semester which this year, as an historic first, will finish before Christmas.

I am having that August-syndrome that teachers get. Not quite the dread I had those years when it all seemed so overwhelming; certainly not the nightmares of my early teaching years when in dreams I wandered desperately down corridors land into classrooms where I had to teach subjects I didn't know anything about. That dream-school (it was always the same building of a navy blue character with principals and offices that were disproportionately large) put me into a permanent state feeling confused, frustrated, frightened and incompetent.

No, I'm not even having the resentment I suffered from a few years back when I turned to meditative writing to clear my head and had to laugh out loud when one of the lines said, "They ought to PAY you for doing that!" Of course they do pay me, and well at that.

When I started teaching here in 2001 I took what amounted to a sizeable reduction in salary. In Wisconsin I would have finally reached about $50,000 per year right about the time I decided that the job and way of life was a pair of golden handcuffs I had to break free from. In Norway, even though I was teaching at a higher level than I had been doing in the States, the salaries were lower and I was earning about $30,000. An interesting fact when one considers the cost of living being a fair amount higher. But what appears to be a higher cost of living is basically higher prices on fruits and vegetables and meat. One of the first things I learned frrom my sister-in-law Nina back in 2001 was to not look at the price tag on healthy food. We live in the arctic and can't expect to have local farm-grown prices like we had in Wisconsin.

Considering the other benefits we have here in terms of no-cost health care, 5-week paid vacations, tuition-free eduction, a 50% tax-reduction at Christmas and 12% tax return in June to use on summer holidays, the cost of living isn't so outrageous. What gets left out is all the weekend consumer shopping that my French class students back in Wisconsin told me was a viable hobby. That's okay, stores are closed on Sunday anyway. Despite some efforts to introduce mega-shopping-malls to Norway, shopping remains more of an as-needed activity.

So what am I really getting at? I am reminding myself that there is a very fair exchange of energy for my work that starts next week. As I have written about in other blogs, I do get that money like everything else is a form of energy exchange. It is important to remember that as we teachers drag our feet back to work. We are not being sent to a 10-month labor camp. We are invited, given the privilege of being able to do what we love to do (i.e. basically spending the work day talking and learning about things that interest us).

As I sit here knowing that tomorrow it will rain and today might be the last bit of sun I will see for a while, as I notice that although it is still what one would call light outside at night we almost need to turn on lights inside, I choose to focus on this week as "the end" of something. Once school starts I still have my life at home with family, my writing, my house that sit in the middle of an abundance of flower beds. Going to school next week is just one other activity that I will be doing, among the ones I have been doing all along. There is no time lost, no too few days of vacation, there is no end ... just a gradual merging over into the season ahead - autumn - which includes a gradual darkening of the world, and lots of time spent at school. That's all. No nightmare. No confusion. And a fair return on the salary.

Here are some of the scenes that surround me at the moment:

Abrupt Encounter with a Shift in Time

2011-08-04T20:19:00.004+02:00

at Gardemoen back from france, i sit in the corner guarding two wheeled carts overloaded with suitcases, waiting for them, vero bia and kazi to get done at dutyfree, and I call the bodø kennel to see if hector can be picked up late, she says he has not been eating, has always left some food in his dish, and today wouldn’t eat, just lay out in the sun and they had to bring him in, make him come in and lie down, and i feel horrible, feel his weakness, have his cough, i am losing my voice too, have had a cough for 3 or 4 days, but his is kennel cough, it should be ok, but he was or is weak, and arthritic, so it is hard to say what shape he is in, if he is normal or not. bia says she wants to come home if he is dying, and i cant say i can promise her he isn’t, but he was doing well before we left, and i think we can get his appetite up again, and see if the kosttilskudd will help his pain, and therefore his appetite, i wonder if he got depressed being there at the kennel, being left behind, i wonder if he will be glad to see us, and I hope his cough goes away really soon, it’s too terrible to think about really, I hope he is back and well and we can get back to normal in our jeema home, looking forward to getting home, having all our rooms, our sofas, our beds, our tv, our HUGE-by-comparison kitchen, our garden (there was no grass in Taverny, except what was in the parks, behind chain ropes and black iron posts), there were actually houses in taverny I did not feel comfortable around, or was it just being out at night in the dark, summer, spooky by the church, the haunted feeling in the house, the woods, I was jittery, like in the old days, in pre-ocean days, or is it just that the light in norway has me always under its wing, and the dark in norway is just a blanket, an embrace… whereas the dark in Taverny was a lowering of the dust, a shroud, landing soon - it is august 4 2011, coming into Norway that is post-22 july

marit sendte en mail

22 juli kl. 13.03

det var i det gamle norge,

det var i Oslo

den gamle Oslo

virgin Oslo

jomfruelige uskyldige uberørte Oslo

lekeplassen Oslo

gylden gate grand cafe Oslo

Oslo med den gule jernbanstasjonen og det blåe trikket

Oslo jeg bodde i som nygift og forelsket

før fremmedfrykten

før 1980 tallet

før krl i hagen og

sverigedemokratene

muhammedtegningen

før 9-11

før 7-22

2 + 2 +7 = 11

viste du det?

er det slik vi skal se etter tegn

tegninger

jeg har ennå ikke tagget byen jeg bor i

med dikt

men jeg har en gull

skrivemaskin

og 10 tagger je kjøpte i London

og noen ord

noen bokstaver

jeg skal omforme

inn til ord

om jeg kan

må prøve

fordi anders behring breivik

er en plagierende feiging

og jeg

og du min kjære

vi skal lære å si

våre egne ord

vi skal erklære, erkjenne

vårt språk

Seeing Utøya from Abroad

2011-08-04T17:51:00.002+02:00

Sitting on the plane from Paris to Oslo.

“The refreshing sound of Norwegian spoken by a flight attendant who didn’t know French…” That was Bia’s first remark.

Mine was “The refreshing sight of the newspapers Dagbladet, Dagens Næringsliv and Aftenposten.”

Sitting here reading about Anders Behring Breivik, whom I have so little respect for. Osama bin Laden had an idea, a belief, a purpose. Breivik, or “Anders” as the press at first called him, is an idiot in the true meaning of the word: one who does not understand politics.

I am not a political person, but it doesn’t take much to see what a poser this jerk is. Knights Templar, Jihadists, British Defence League, Oslo’s B-gangsters, there’s almost no end to the claims to association he makes. Only to be denied by all, from right and left. His so-called manifesto is a cut-and-paste job of plagiarism from everything to the Unabomber to Osama bin Laden. Timothy McVeigh was an ideologist by comparison.

Behring Breivik is at the same time symptomatic of our quasi-connected-globalized-world, which masks our increased isolationism: he is a loner spewing opinions and calling it debate. An academic wannabe who fashions himself a leading voice in a worldwide debate on, ironically, the evils of globalized society.

What gets me is what a goddamned coward he is. Bin Laden at least gets credit for acting symbolically. What does Breivik do? He calls for the Prime Minister’s resignation and the King’s abdication while shooting down young people on an island, and not as himself, not standing up for who he is and whatever agenda he has, no he does it in disguise. I wonder if anyone noticed he was dressed up as an armed policeman as he walked aboard the ferryboat for Utøya. Norwegians react with alarm when they see an armed police officer, which most of them never do unless it is while traveling abroad. In Norway the police don’t carry guns on normal routine duty. Breivik knew this. The coward. He didn’t march up to the King’s palace and open fire where he would have encountered armed guards. He didn’t go for the assassination of Gro Harlem Bruntland, Norway’s most renown political figure and thus a target of symbolic and political value, because her public appearance, like that of the minister of Defense at Utøya, would have included armed guards.

No, Breivik waits until the magic hour of 1500, which in Norway is called “sommertid” which basically translates into “no one stays at work past 3 o’clock in the summer because, hey, we have to take advantage of summer while we have it.” Most businesses close early during summer vacation, which is the month of July, so there’s hardly anyone around when Breivik blows up the government office buildings as a smokescreen for his BIG OPERATION: the Labor Party Youth Summer Camp.

I am galled at the cowardice and pointlessness of this idiot’s actions, as much as anything. Terrorists, from the IRA to the Red Brigade to Hamas and Al Qaeda, even fucking Guy Fawkes had a point, for Pete’s sake.

Breivik is one disgusting individual.

When I get home there will be a pile of newspapers telling me all about it. Today’s Dagbladet tells me that video games are being pulled off the shelf, because Behring Breivik liked to play them. Say what? The guy is a psychopath. In my view toy guns and video games do not a psychopath make.

In Dagens Næringsliv there are two seemingly conflicting opinions. One commentator says that we need more censorship and control over the internet, that blogs and media commentary are under editorial responsibility, and anonymity must be done away with. The other commentator says that the problem is we don’t have a political party that gives voice to extreme right wing ideologies, like the National Front in France or Sverigedemokratene whose platform is islamophobic and anti-immigration. Both newspapers report that “foreign reporters in Oslo” (I am guessing American) are appalled that the police did not get out to Utøya sooner.

Well, I’ll give Behring Breivik this: his smokescreen did work. And for a while after the bombing, people in Oslo were accosting Muslim looking individuals on the street. Just like in Oklahoma City when a Palestinian man who had boarded a plane just before Timothy McVeigh’s bomb went off was assumed guilty. Sitting in Paris, I was worried about Norway being pulled into an international conflict if in fact a terrorist group had bombed government headquarters.

It was a relief, really, to learn about the creepy individual behind all this horror. To call him a terrorist is to give him a credibility he does not deserve. Every real terrorist, from Al Qaeda or Hamas today to the Red Brigade and IRA from the past, is somebody’s freedom fighter. A soldier in an ideological ground war. Anders Behring Breivik is a mass murderer, simple as that. He can call it a war, but I don’t buy it. Wars are fought by soldiers whose uniforms identify which side they are on. Not by wolves in sheep’s clothing, which all Behring Breivik was in his attack.

The Eiffel Tower by Night, for Sheila who suffered the most authentic of all French experiences, the transit strike...

2011-08-02T12:12:00.001+02:00

La cuisine à la française

2011-08-02T11:45:00.001+02:00

Yes, indeed, the French still seem to shop daily and eat sparingly as a friend of mine writes. They go out for their daily bread and munch off the top of it on their way home. They stand in line at the bakery, and most of the daily provision shops have one door you go in and queue towards the register, and another door you go out next to the register.

The first day Kazi and I stumbled up on a butchers we stood in the window for a long time wondering what the heck we were looking at. The friendly butcher knocked on the glass and motioned us in, "We explain everything, Madame!"

the sheep brains are noticeably inexpensive!

These pictures are not from that carchuterie, which is a prepared meats charcutery, but from the open market on Sunday where we decided to go for red meat like Norway has never seen the likes of. The butcher gave us a roast that was twice as big as we could have possibly eaten in one meal, and told me to put it in a hot over for 25 minutes. Comme ça c'est parfait Madame! Knowing how bloody red the French like their meat we decided to do the opposite, a slow oven for about an hour.

Then we stood in line for some French beans: long, green, slightly furry, and snapping with flavor that tastes of the farm in summer.

And voilà! Bifteck aux haricots verts!

with a garnish of fresh glazed apricots

BON APÉTIT!

Les élèves me manquent

2011-08-02T00:09:00.002+02:00

I miss my students.

The 7th grade French students I used to wow with my French-only-approach to class the first day of school. Once, in Chicago, a handsome young man in his mid-twenties came up to me at a conference and said, "Aren't you Mme Haidri? I've always remembered how you blew us away that first day of middle school." I had only a vague memory of who he was, but I knew what he was talking about.

Somewhere I have a scrapbook in which many of their names are written on cards and letters they wrote when I took maternity leave. I still have the impressionist card of a pen holder, flowers, window, coffee cup, that Chris Smith gave me. Other names slip my mind now, but I could find them in the scrapbook, on the letters that said Fëlicitations Madame et bébé! The girl who made origami boxes for my baby, the girl who sat with a sketchpad drawing page after page of colorful geometric patterns which she was going to use in her future as a designer, the girl who told me (after we read Le Petit Prince) that grown-ups sit down to be with their children but don't ever really play, they just act like they do, the girl who begged me not to tell her mother what the note from the boy (who had brought a gerbil to show and tell) said she should do next time they met. My classroom full of my hand drawn posters of Snoopy and Babar and Lucy and Charlie Brown speaking French phrases the students needed to get by in our little French world that was our classroom, but also the field trips we took to the Milwaukee multicultural fair and weekends at French immersion camp.

I miss my students as I look over the skyline of Paris and know that they and I both once knew the name of every monument. I remember their diligent attention to the features of romanesque and gothic architecture as I explained the 200-year-long unfolding of Notre Dame cathedral. I remember their delight at learning the literal meaning of Les Bateaux Mouches. Their drawings of the difference between glasses for Cognac and red and white wine, their eager efforts at making crêpes, Bouche de Noël or French omelettes for extra credit. The team of boys who rolled up their chocolate yule log without removing the wax paper and didn't think to whip the cream before pouring it over the petrified concoction. I miss my students as I look at the rose window of Notre Dame and recognize the rare blue glass they used to regard with hushed awe on my slides. I remember their skits as waiters and thieves and tourists and fashion models as I shop for clothes at the market at Cligancourt or sit in a café and call out Monsieur, l'addition s'il vous plaît.

I miss my students when a lady in a shop says I must be a professor of French, when I converse with the gebroken Chinese cab driver, when the man comes up to me as I stand in the middle of Trocadéro hailing taxis and explains where the taxi stand is. I miss how my students used to climb on top of and under their desks to demonstrate dessus and dessous, and dance around their chairs mimicking à côtè de, à gauche de, à droite de, tout droit, près de, loin de. I think of my students when the bouncer at the Crazy Horse tells me that the metro stops running in twenty minutes so I better run. I remember how I drilled them in telling the time, in asking questions and giving commands, in singing the alphabet, and pretending to sock their imaginary brother in the stomach with the letter e (/ø/) and smile in the mirror to practice the difference between /i/ and /y/, to gargle their r's. I remember their earnest faces accepting with no ontological qualms my claim that gramatically speaking, there are only six people in the world: je, tu, il, nous, vous, ils.

I wonder how many of them ever came to France. If any of them, like me, love Paris in a way that defies reason. There is no reason I love Paris, I just always have.

I think this is my 7th time here, and while riding down the Seine our first night, I see the familiar towers and roofs and get tears in my eyes. Tears of joy at having those I love with me here. Tears of being deeply touched by the notion that I might never return. One time will have to be the last.
What will my last glimpse of Paris be? Which rooftop, which grilled and shuttered window with the pink geraniums, which park bench or pigeon or bouquiniste?

La Quotidienne

2011-08-01T18:53:00.001+02:00

Sunday morning line at the bakery, Taverny

Heat the milk, brew the coffee, totter on down to the pastry shop, the bakers, the butchers, and the supermarket, which is either a street side Carrefour: a miniature version of Coop Mega: high quality, well-equipped, clean and inviting; or a corner arab family run shop with red awning and a small row of vegetable crates lining the way into the store from the sidewalk.

It, too, is small, but it is Sunday afternoon this is the only grocer's open, so here you find everything that is on your list except Woolite, which you are glad for because the small shop's price's are high and you can wait with that till tomorrow, and after-sun-lotion, which you do find but hesitate to pay 8 € for when Bia says that last summer when she and Eline got even worse sunburned than she did today Eline's grandmother smeared tomatoes over them. We buy tomatoes instead. And wine for dinner. And non-refrigerated milk. And honey. And what I think is hot chocolate but turns out to be chocolate flavored baby cereal made with bananas and real chocolate chips. Oh well, I blame it on the distraction made by the store owner who at that point came up to me and Bia whose arms were full of small items (butter, coffee, Nutella, the wine, the milk, the tomatoes, the honey) and held a small red shopping cart open for us to deposit everything into. His smile revealed an understanding that in Norway the shopping cart has not been invented.

Tomorrow the big market is open, and by big I mean super - hyper - market. The Achan supermarket, in the mall, is what Coop hypermarket at City Nord dreams of being, but it is a pretender. Achan, just like Monoprix on rue de Vaugirard next to our hotel in Paris, is a supermarket that knows the meaning of super. It is literally the size of a small village where you can buy everything from fresh sardines to absinthe to diapers to cocktail part clothes and house painting frocks to Lays potato chips and BUGLES, which I bought for the memory of happily crunching them as a child.

Back in Taverny we spend the evening playing cards and falling into giggle fits over various inanities. Take a long walk through the darkening streets, marvel at the unfamiliar combination of senses: warmth, darkness, and honeysuckle perfuming the starless sky.

Money, money, money - bad for the spirit?

2011-07-26T14:59:00.001+02:00

In Reiki healing the teaching is that the person receiving the reiki must pay. Reiki is energy, and money, too, is only energy so the exchange of energy for energy creates a perfect balance. It is said that when Mikao Usui came down from Kurama mountain with Reiki he offered it at first for free, but found that it had a healing effect only for those who were willing to pay for it.

Be that as it may, we have a general cultural taboo against asking for money for something when it is 1) esoteric 2) creative 3) spiritual 4) anything other than the product of materialistic-capitalistic greed. In other words: words, thoughts, ideas, and art in its many forms are passed these days from one person to another, shared on blogs, bulletin boards, webpages, emails and all other aspects of the virtual world where a large part of the world spends a large part of the day. I have sometimes wondered at the willingness of people to allow their work to be copied and spread around on flickr and facebook and what have you. And I have considered myself just too plain selfish to do the same. Or I haven't learned the rules yet to know how to play the game. If there is a game.

I have published lots of poems, and been paid nothing for most of them. I have published lots of essays and been paid a few hundred dollars for some of them and nothing for others. I have grown up in a literary culture where you don't expect to be paid for your writing, unless of course you are in the big league of publishing blockbusters. But every creative writer I know, even those with a long list of book titles to their credit, earn their living by doing something else. This makes writing into a type of hobby, because it is what we do for free.

And of course we have to do it for free, because the magazines and anthologies that publish us are always on the brink of economic doom. We don't expect them to be making money, and we don't expect them to pay us.

Why aren't they making money? Because we don't want to pay to read the books and magazines. We get them at discount rates, off discount tables at the bookstore, from the discount online booksellers. When was the last time I paid full price for a book? Well, I actually did just order a whole load from Alibris. Most of the books I needed could not be purchased with a comparison-buying approach, they either were not in print, or they were, and I paid for them with my research grant money.

A few years ago when I approached a publisher and asked them to let me write a textbook for them, I was just thrilled to be given the opportunity. I had no idea how much I would be paid, but coming from the mindset of creative writer, I expected it to be not much. A few thousand dollars would have been more than I had ever made before from writing. The book project was difficult, grueling, and as I plodded along I swore to myself never again, no way was this worth the effort. But it was, because unlike most of my writing being a labor of love, I have earned a fair chunk of money from that book.

But there is that terminology again: creative writing is a labor of love, so don't expect to get paid.... whereas textbook writing is a hellish toil, so of course you are paid well for it? I don't know. I work just as hard at my creative writing, more really, because the textbook writing was, when I look back on it, much easier than, say, finding a way to end my essay "Urdu, My Love Song," which took years. But when I finally found a way to end it, the thing was done, and perfect. And I was paid a hundred dollars for it. Then it earned me an award and I got another $500. Then the teacher's union got wind of it and gave me about $600 more. Then a college textbook asked to reprint it in a course book, with no mention of compensation. Now another university has asked to put it in a compendium, and told me to bill them for it.

Therein lies my dilemma. If they had asked to reprint it for free I would have said yes. If they said we'll pay you a hundred dollars to reprint it I would have said yes. But they have asked to reprint it and put the onus of determining the monetary value of the essay onto me.

Lil' old me, the creative writer, who isn't supposed to want money for my creative writing, because creative writing is creative, a labor of love, a spiritual state of affairs, not to be tarnished by talk of money. And, you might well say, hasn't the wench been paid enough for the essay already? Aren't most essays written and published FOR FREE?

Yes, they are. But should they be? Why shouldn't we be paid, well paid at that, for creating something that invokes the human spirit, touches the human heart, stirs the human mind? Why is not a labor of love deserving of lots and lots of money?

I just did a google search for "costs for reprint rights" and found that the universal conversation going on out there is about how cheaply something can be obtained, how to get by without paying, where to find the cheapest volumes of this and that, and how many words can you use of somebody else's writing without having to even tell them about it.

Money, it seems, cheapens the worth... the best values are those in which the least amount of money can be used. WELL DUH you might say, best value for money means cheapest price doesn't it?

Does it? I just spent the day at Paris' largest flea market, at Clignancourt. Bargaining prices down is part of the game, but at one point I thought to myself why shouldn't this old man from Senegal, this young immigrant from Morocco, this hardworking waiter from the 18th arrondissement get as MUCH money as I can afford to pay for their good service or quality product, rather than as little money as I can get by with? Why is money the dirty word, the point of contention, the issue that raises the hackles and provokes the ire of citizen-man?

Mikao Usui had another notion. That paying more money for something actually increased its value. This gets me back to what to charge for my essay. I went onto the website of the NFFO, the writers union I belong to, and found that low and behold they actually had a table for what to charge for reprint rights. By the line, the word, the number of characters including spaces, and depending on the type of publication and print-run. So I get out my trusty calculator and decide I will calculate out the various options, and charge the university in England the cheapest.

About a thousand dollars, charging by the number of lines, is the cheapest.

But they aren't going to want to pay that are they? A poor struggling university whose goal is to edify the minds of young people would be offended if I asked a thousand dollars for an essay which they could have just photocopied out of another book and used without my ever knowing it, right? Will I sound like a selfish boar instead of a creative writer if I ask for so much money? Will they say no thanks and not want the essay any more?

Here I sit, unable to deal with, or understand, or determine the worth of a piece of creative writing that I put my heart and soul into writing and which others seem to really get something out of too. But that means I should just give it away, right?

Or does it mean I should be well paid?

All I know is that as a creative writer, I am used to someone else deciding on whether I will get a thimbleful or a spoonful of crumbs tossed my way, and saying yessuh, thankyee suh, when they do.

A lazy afternoon in Taverny, a nightmare in Oslo

2011-07-22T17:43:00.002+02:00

We finally got on the internet on our computers, my airbook, Bia's macbook, Kazi's android pad, and the first thing we see is: Explosion in Oslo. Witnessing here the wildfire of the internet as gossip rages about bombs and deaths and how many explosions and the big why and what for. It is strange because before coming to Paris I had thought about how likely a target it is for a seasonal bombing, like the one in London, Madrid, Mumbai... Paris was a virgin target... but Oslo? Well we don't know anything yet, it could have been an accident or a fluke, and hopefully the damage isn't as widespread and vast as rumored. We are keeping an eye on things, as well as we can, since Norwegian broadcasting doesn't allow for live feed outside the country.

And drinking our café au lait and eating our gateaux.

At the airport wondering what's undone

2011-07-22T17:34:00.002+02:00

Are we finally out of the house and into the airport, having locked the correct keys into the car and placed it so the French people can find it? Have we locked the shed and turned off the stove and more importantly, have we CLEANED ALL THE CORNERS and put the dog in the kennel and the cat food out and fed the fish? Have I made everything clear to the French people in my 17 page Household Instructions Brochure and the 8+ additional post-it notes I left on the purple table in the den. Will they find the den? Did I leave the right key?

IS THERE ANYTHING WE FORGOT?

Usually when embarking on a two-week vacation that question may involve what we forgot to bring, but right now my mind is on what we have forgotten to leave... for "the French people" who will be inhabiting our house, as we will theirs in Taverny, during the next two weeks. The house in Hestdalen has never looked so good. It is really shining like a jeema jewel after being gone over with a chamois the way I have only before ever cleaned a house I was going to sell or move out of. It does something to you, to clean like that, gives you a sense of ownership of the house you have owned but only lived in for a decade or so.

Okay, that is an exaggeration, it is not like I have never cleaned before, but certain things, like the kitchen ceiling have actually not been done. I had noticed the slow yellowing of the tiles but chose to cast my eyes earthward in blissful denial of the situation, not really knowing what to do about it except 1) try to paint it some fine day or 2) that failed, hire a carpenter to put in a new ceiling. I even asked a colleague at work about washing ceilings, figuring that she, being older than me and a real Norwegian, would have the skill and instinct for what is called "rundvask" - yes, Norwegians have a word for the kind of thorough cleaning that in my vernacular MAYBE resembles spring cleaning, but as I recall from my early married days, was to be done by all adult members of the household every Saturday morning. It was one cultural tradition we allowed to get watered down, no pun intended.

My colleague, to my surprise, said she had only washed a ceiling once, although her mother used to do it and she thought the key ingredient was ammonia. I noted the tip, but immediately returned to my chosen state of procrastination, thinking that if Tove has only washed her ceilings once then I was allowed to be in avoidance mode.

All that was before the onset of "THE FRENCH PEOPLE ARE COMING!" the state of affairs since summer's start, wondering how the house will suit them, appeal to them, serve them, please them. It is a bit nerve wracking to not only pack for your two-week vacation, but get your house ready for strangers who will be vacationing in it at the same time. I remembered that one time during the fateful summer of 2001 when we came to the house while Olga was still in possession, I saw her washing the living room ceiling with a long handled mop. So I knew the basics: ammonia and mop, and thought it could not possibly look worse than it did, even if it didn't come clean.

So I washed the walls, scraped the grease off the tops of the cupboards, and mopped the ceiling, in a increasing progression of delight as the room became more and more cheerful. All the while I was thinking of my mom's sister, Aunt Barbara, whose housecleaning skills gained mythic proportions as related in appreciative terms by my mother. In short, my mother's account of her growing up was that her older sister Florence ordered everyone to pull her around in a red wagon while she swathed her arthritic limbs with Noxzema, her little sister Louie was given a wide girth of peace and quiet because she got to prioritize her homework, and her other little sister Barbara did the chores, both inside the house and out in the barn with the men, from the time she was five years old. It was clear that of the sisters, my mother thought Barbara had turned out with the most useful skills. What her own role was, other than that of observer, was not clear, but my mother admired Barbara for her well clipped and organized method of running her household, which included raising her four daughters to clean both the in- under and oversides of cupboards, and to never fight.

I've succeeded in raising my daughters to never fight, and both of them have had part-time jobs as cleaning help, so I guess one generation makes up for the follies of another. I am still learning though. The house in Hestdalen is all a-sparkle. I think Aunt Barbara would even think so.

Sunday, it must be...

2011-06-26T16:55:00.001+02:00

You sit long enough in a hotel room, writing poems and rewriting poems, and there comes a moment when you startle because you realize you have no idea what country, what language, what place this is. The only question that doesn't occur is what are you doing here, because you are doing this: writing and rewriting poems, in Scrivener, which organizes and color codes them, and assures you that indeed all the writing and rewriting is getting somewhere.

A vague beacon is visible outside the cloud that is your head. It is a beckoning deadline, for which all this writing and rewriting is intended. But you stop, look around, and realize it is going on two o'clock and you have yet to check out of your hotel room. You have yet to shower and get dressed. You manage both of those things in fifteen minutes and are just wheeling your suitcase away from the bed when the short, smiling, Thai maid bursts into the room with a vacuum cleaner, sorry sorry did not know someone here.

That's alright, I'm just leaving you say, and go down three floors to a landing where there is a velour chaise lounge in a small area between the locked door of the dining hall and the locked door of the stairwell, and you sit down there to continue your work, writing and rewriting poems, drafts, deleted drafts, second drafts, revised drafts, making folders called finished, almost finished, finished and published, finished and not published, published and not finished.

It feels like progress. There is a large elegant mirror on the wall opposite the velour chaise lounge, and you stand up for a stretch before it, realize you have not yet done your hair, take a break to dig out the little Boots pill box that has carried hair clay in it for you since that trip to London in 2006, back before Boots stores came to Norway.

Norway, yes this is Norway. You are in a hotel in Norway. Yes, Harstad. That is where you are, Harstad. In fact, just this morning you said goodbye to your colleagues, the secretary has paid for your room with her credit card, you have a bus to catch at five thirty, yes, there is a plane to catch too. You have a ticket. There is a destination. There is a home with clocks, beyond this cubicle, this vacuous, blissful, zombie state of writing and rewriting in which five hours is a blink of an eye.

Tromsø and the coastal steamer

2011-06-26T00:14:00.001+02:00

After three days in Sweden we crossed the Saltfjell plateau and met the wall of pine tree mountains that is Norway, the world’s most beautiful country. Still, it felt a wee bit claustrophobic after so much horizon in Sweden; in Norway you can just see over the next rise.

Got home near 11 p.m. last night and left this morning at 9 for Tromsø where I now sit in the Aunegården café… and there goes my bus… I am done at the library and it doesn’t matter what time I get back to the hotel, which is located in a horrible backyard of a warehouse district on the outskirts of the airport.

Exam sensor meeting tomorrow, today research at the library for children’s non-fiction. I was lucky enough to be right downtown at 14:30 when the Coastal Steamer pulled in with hundreds of passengers, mostly unwitting foreigners who happen to be stand-ins in Norway’s cultural event du jour: the five day long minute-by-minute broadcast of the Coastal Steamer’s voyage North. I just caught a few minutes of it when I came home last night, and it was magical. Almost Zen, as Veronica put it.

I can’t quite imagine the brainstorming session at NRK when someone said, “Well, if we are going to think outside the box, what about a 5 day minute by minute live documentary of the Coastal Steamer’s voyage north? No commentary. No instruction. Just footage shot from camera’s on the bow, the stern, and at the ports of call.”

“Yes!” everyone cries and the rest is documentary history.

The passengers, mostly German, were met with flags, balloons, people dressed up as penguins and trolls, free hotdogs and coffee, and a drumming band in blue and white uniform (the colors of the conservative party, which is sponsoring bands to greet the steamer up and down the coast). I wonder if they think this is the way Norwegians always behave when the steamer stops in town, which it does everyday.

For those of us who know better, know that for Norwegians to come out en masse, smiling and waving, requires an extraordinary event. Something about this documentary has touched the national soul, quickened the collective heart, and put a sentimental tear in the nation’s eye. Why? It is the sight of Norway itself that amazes us, over and over again.

Super speeds and reindeer

2011-06-26T00:10:00.007+02:00

Sweden does not have the world’s largest forest. Sweden IS the world’s largest forest. 6 hours wide from the Norwegian border to the Gulf of Bothnia when driving at the lickety-split speed of somewhere between 100 − 133 kph. 95 kph is the speed when meandering through construction areas and flocks of reindeer. Still, my driving partner Jan, whom I was following in the car ahead of me, chided me after we had arrived and were watching the girls play (and win) their first football match:

“So you’re one of those who likes to drive slow,” he laughed.

Ha ha, I laughed, thinking at first he was kidding. But he wasn't. He and another Norwegian man started making quips and jabs about needing a tow rope. Bia joined in with the comment that I had actually stopped once to wonder where Jan was.

That wasn’t stopping, I said. That was driving up the final Norwegian mountain before entering the forest of Sweden, on a 12% grade with very little oxygen. Yes, it felt like we were standing still. And yes, I had wondered aloud where Jan was, but I was joking. He had to be ahead of us, as there is only the one road. We topped the crest on level with the puffy cumulous clouds dotting the blue sky. Then ahead of us, as in a scene out of a Hollywood movie, we saw the road twisting in wide loops around the sides of the mountain, at the cliff’s edge. And there was Jan’s black VW stationwagon. He was never out of sight for long. Every double semi he passed, I passed too, eventually.

The Swedish superhighway was a little wider than a county road in Wisconsin. Not a lot of room for passing, and with the threat of moose and reindeer approaching from either side it was, in short, a thrilling gallop, with the radio blaring songs from the ipod and Bia and Anna chatting up a storm in between a few brief intervals of dozing.

Bia was afraid that if she slept I would fall asleep, and I remember that feeling of responsibility. I was the navigator and in charge of driver-alertness on our many miles of commuting between Oak Ridge and Manhattan and Oak Ridge and Rio and Oak Ridge and Florida during my formative years. You develop a habit of worrying about things you can’t really control, nor should you have to.

“I’ll wake you if I need you to talk to me,” I told her. "But I’m not feeling tired at all.”

“Ok, and wake me if something exciting happens. Like a moose. Or an accident,” she chirrped and settled down with her pillow.

"You'll notice the car slow down and wake up," I assured her. "And when it does, don't forget to take pictures."

And she did....

The Obliteration of Something That Never Was?

2011-06-21T08:59:00.002+02:00

Maybe I'll start over. Maybe I'll resurrect myself in a new form. But for now I'm signing off, drawing the knife, knotting the noose, taking the plunge: committing ritual facebook suicide. I have already done the necessary backup of my affairs. Maybe I’ll go in and knock off each of my friends first, or maybe I’ll just kick the chair and let them wonder where I am.

Not that they will necessarily notice. That’s part of my dilemma with facebook. The scrambling to be friends, the collecting of friend portraits, the tagging of friends in pictures… a frantic hamster activity seen from the point of view of someone who would rather drink their orange juice in their hotel room as I am doing now than down in the breakfast room with a few hundred colleagues, some of whom I actually know. On facebook it seems to me everyone is waving and no one is really waving back, just waving with their own stuff in their hand. Like show-and-tell amongst a very competitive group of 8 year olds.

The last straw was finding pictures of myself in a state of mourning after my mother’s sudden death put up on my niece’s facebook page with tags to my profile. No, I didn’t tell her I didn’t want the pictures there. She owns them. Her father took them. They have nothing to do with me except that they are of me. And I have no control over that. All her friends and relatives get to see what I felt like in the hellish winter of time between finding my mother dead on the Saturday before Thanksgiving and burying her before the turkey leftovers were served.

I don’t want anything to do with it anymore. I go onto facebook and find I don’t know what to say about my status, primarily because I don’t know who I am saying it to. And once I have deliberated that, gotten a grip on the situation and posted my status, made a few comments on someone else’s or my own wall, then the long anxious waiting sets in, waiting for comments in return. Æsj, it just evokes all the anxiety of a 7th grade school dance.

I know. It’s just me. Don’t bother telling me how I just don’t understand or appreciate the value of facebook and social communities at large, how I need to lighten up and not be so analytical… I know. And this is why I am saying goodbye cruel world to a place I cannot get a grip on. The final blow was the “social community” of writers I met last summer at Vermont Studio Center who all cross-facebooked-each other, including me. And then silence. Turned cheek. Ignored messages and postings. Shunned, and that for reasons I do not understand, but it has something perhaps to do with cultural adaptation. I think I am speaking the same language as them, but my words may as well be written in invisible ink. And it is my fault, not theirs. They are happily carrying on in the virtual world that connects them. I wish them well. And adieu.

The End of Raining Words

2011-06-05T17:14:00.001+02:00

First, a clarification. The Reine Ord Festival has nothing to do with Rain; it is held in Reine, Lofoten, which must be one of the most impractical places on the planet to hold a serious literary festival that sports readings by local and national writers of high repute, as well as international names such as this year's André Brink. The only place more out of the way that I can think of to hold a festival would be Tasmania. Met a gentleman from there today who told me that every two years Tasmania holds an "island arts" festival with representation within theater and art from all the island communities of the world... except, so far, Lofoten. I gave him my card with the promise that I could round up some Norwegian poets for the next festival. We'll see what comes of that. In the meantime, Reine Ord Festival, in the tiny Hamlet of Reine, population less than 400, has got to be one of the most ambitious projects undertaken in the name of literature anywhere.

The name Reine sounds like "ren" which means clean or pure in Norwegian. So the name carries associations of just words or pure words and even clean words although that is my least favorite English rendition. I called it Raining Words because of the near rhyme with the Norwegian, and the fact that it has been pouring rain all week, and it usually does. The literary bigwigs who held readings and panel discussions were not handed roses or even bottles of wine as tokens of the festival's appreciation. They were given yellow fishermen's rain hats.

Norway's greatest living poet Jon Erik Vold and blues singer Kåre Virud
after performing Vold's translations of Bob Dylan

The same hats were worn by a number of ladies from the Fredrikstad Reading Circle who were out taking early morning walks today. Fredrikstad, if you check your map of Norway, is way south of Oslo, somewhere near Denmark in fact. 37 of these ladies, average age 69, traveled up here by plane, ferry, bus and mini-bus to attend the festival. They might not have spent more than the 14 hours I spent getting here on Wednesday, but they certainly covered more ground. Now I’m sitting in the lounge of Eliasen’s fishermen’s cabins, waiting for the bus to Leknes. There were two buses today. One at noon that the Tasmanian gentleman was scheduled to take, and the one I am waiting for at six thirty. With the only plane out of here at 9 p.m., the options were wait for 8+ hours at the airport or wait for 8+ hours at the fishermen’s cabin. Been there done that at the airport, so I opted to wait at the cabin. Besides, here is a kitchen where I can toast my last few slices of bread and brew my last few cups of Constant Comment tea.

I have managed to eat most of my provisions that were causing my suitcase to weigh in at 23 kilo on the trip over. However two cans of pepper mackerel and a package of hard tack remain, most likely because I did indeed eat out twice. Both times were social dinners related to the festival, so they will be covered by my travel stipend from the writer’s union which has so nicely sponsored my trip. I also saw it as a unique opportunity to eat local fare that is just not going to ever show up in the kitchen at home. On Friday it was fried cod tongues and on Saturday it was fresh loin of whale.

Delicious, both, in each their own exotic way. If I were stranded on a desert island with one of them to eat it would be the whale. Sorry Moby Dick, I’m a savage.

murder scene after Brazen's disappearance

Speaking of Moby, I had a dream the other night that Moby, the goldfish, had grown to huge dimensions and had a flowing angel-fish tale. I am looking forward to getting home and seeing the little critters and proving the dream to be only a dream. Otherwise it was quite creepy. They four new little goldfish, which started out about the length of my thumb, have grown, but not that fast. They are replacements for the 4 year old koi fish Coy and Brazen who had grown to dinner plate size and were similarly consumed by respectively a crow and a cat.

Besides seeing the family and menagerie, what I am really looking forward to after five days of submersion in literary edification, unhindered time to write, solitude and blissful natural surroundings is to get on the exercise bike and lose myself in a double episode of Veronica Mars season 2 reruns. Yes! Civilization here I come!

Just have to get my suitcase closed around the (top secret and unnamed) number of books I got. Hmm, come to think of it they weigh a lot more than the food I had with me. Hope that little plane back to Bodø is flying nearly empty again so my extra heavy bag won't matter. Come to think of it, chances are they will be glad for some ballast!

Gjennom skriving lærer man seg selv å kjenne

2011-06-04T18:44:00.005+02:00

Når Vigdis Hjort sier skriv et oppgjørsbrev med deg selv

må jeg først velge et språk, tenke fordeler og ulemper,

morsmål eller mormorsmål, engelsk eller norsk

blir det Dear Rasma eller Hei du!

Jeg stopper opp med hva heter “oppgjørsbrev” på engelsk.

Har vi det ordet? Og uten ordet har man tanken?

George Orwell visket bort ord som freedom og love

slik at folk i 1984 ikke kunne eie disse følelsene.

Eier amerikanerne oppgjørsbrev?

Oppgjør ... revenge / avenge / rebellion / riot

eller er det opprør? Jeg må slutte å oversette.

Hylla med ordbøker ligger i Bodø, i et annet land.

Dette er et Bedehus i Lofoten. Jeg må tenke konsept.

Jeg sitter blant fire rad skrivende kvinner.

Fremst i salen leser Vigdis Hjort våre tekster.

Av og til river hun et ark i biter, legger det pent til side.

Tenk på engelsk. Tenk på engelsk. Tenk på engelsk.

Jeg kommer på “A Letter of Reconciliation” men det blir jo feil.

Ville ikke det være et foreningsbrev?

Så har vi “The Dear John Letter” for når man skal gjøre det slutt

fordi noen bedre har dukket opp.

Nei, dette skal være et oppgjør, ikke et skilsmisse.

Brevet må være på norsk. Det er bestemt.

Jeg forstår jo ordet oppgjør

(I begynnelsen var Ordet, så kom Tanken)

men nå er jeg blitt så innmari trøtt

at jeg holder på å sovne av

språk er en vugge

skriving en vuggesang...

hysj… ikke snakk... legg deg ned... bare glemme...

mitt oppgjørsbrev er bare en krøll

som blir til en strek

som detter av arket

så pennen detter

på låret mitt

og jeg skvetter

når Vigdis Hjort sier Nå kan dere legge brevene deres her…

Jeg gjesper. Reiser meg.

Går bakerst i rommet

tar en kopp kaffe

og en kjeks.

Raining Words Festival - part 2

2011-06-02T23:39:00.008+02:00

In the fjord outside my window the seagulls are affronted by deep-sea divers who are calling it a day. Or calling it a night. Here you can call a night a day and no one will protest. Only the gulls, and they protest no matter what you do. They look so soft and white, have such elegant curves, soar with such grace… but what demonic voices gurgle in their throats.

Vigdis Hjort told this story: Two little old ladies getting off the tram in Oslo stop to listen to the birds. “Have you ever heard such beautiful birdsong?” says the first. “It’s all just sex!” says the other.

If birdsong is all about sex then the seagulls aren’t getting any. They are the very voice of cranky irritability.

In 1989, which was the last time I was in Reine, there were dead seagulls stuck on poles over the racks of drying cod. Bloody, ravaged seagull corpses to frighten the other gulls away from the fish. Today when I drove from Hamnøy to Reine there were rows of gulls sitting on the rows of fish. I wonder if it has become illegal to hang dead seagulls in your backyard. Maybe it's just become politically incorrect.

I said I drove to Reine today but that’s inaccurate. I was driven. By a taxi charging exponential holiday rates of something like 30 kroner a minute. I had no choice if I was going to get to the actual opening of the literary festival, as all the people I had thought I could get a ride with dematerialized. Agatha in the reception. Lillian in the cultural center. Agatha’s husband in the reception. The mystery guest in room 4 who checked out early.

Suddenly I was on my own in a recap of yesterday’s transportation dilemma, only in reverse. Sort of like the theory that if you pass through a black hole you get to a parallel universe where everything that is happening here is happening there, in a mirror image. As the opposite. You see, unlike yesterday at the airport when I had to fight for my right to walk a kilometer, today when I asked about transportation to Reine, hoping I could bum a ride since the buses aren’t running, three different people were quick to suggest I walk. It’s a nice walk. Oh about 5 kilometers. You can do it in under an hour and a half. Maybe an hour and a quarter.

An hour and a what? Even half an hour would have been out of the question: in the rain on a narrow road with cars speeding by on one side, rack after rack of smelly dead fish on the other, seagulls threatening overhead… I called a taxi.

At the Reine kultursenter who is the first person I see? Jørgen Mathiasen. He’s here as a volunteer. And there’s Hege, who is here on an excursion with her entire book group. Yes, they bought their festival passes and booked their hotel a year ago. It turns out that is the way to do it. Tickets to Lars Saabye Christiansen were not available. I did get to hear Jan Erik Vold rapping Bob Dylan. Sat in the front row and got him to sign my copy of 12 Meditations. He is a very young older man who along with Ibsen and Vinje was my portal into Norwegian language and literature. It was quite amazing, a privilege, to sit literally at his feet and witness his masterful translations performed with Kåre Virud, the blues singer who has made it a point to never sing in English. Applause for that.

Today Vigdis Hjort said find your core issue and write about that. My core issue here is language. And all that language entails of culture, identity, self. She read my text to the class and said, "when it gets tightened it will do what Knausgård has done, put words on the relationship the writer has to his language." I don’t know about the literary quality of my text, but it was nice even to be thematically connected to Knausgård!

Here it is, still full of errors no doubt:

På skrivekurs

Damene kommer inn i rommet i par,

som om de allerede kjenner hverandre,

som om de er valgt ut to og to, og bedehuset

hvor Vigdis Hjort holder skrivekurs er Noahs Ark.

Jeg kan ikke dette språket de snakker:

kvinnens uendelige ordflom.

Da jeg var fire år sa min søster til meg --

Du, vet du hva? Nei? sa jeg (jeg husker vi var

på badet, hvit porselen, flis, sommer i vinduet).

Du bør holde opp med å snakke så mye, sa hun,

ellers blir du snart fri for ord. Du får bare utdelt

så og så mange ord, skjønner du, og hvis du

bruker dem opp nå, blir du stående igjen senere

uten ord. Jeg så for meg de lange ordtomme årene

som var mitt framtidige liv. De var som rør av en

ekkel farge jeg ikke hadde ord for. Ikke da og ikke nå

heller. Nå har jeg bare følelsen av et rør

hvor språket skulle være.

Der fikk jeg en SMS. Fra noen som vil snakke med meg?

Det er fra Telenor: Delta i vår lille dekningsquiz --

er du like suveren som oss kan du vinne en iPad 2 32GB.

Lykke til! Lykke til? Til lykke? Tli ikke? Ly ketil? Kykli te?

Hva vil de at jeg skal gjøre? Jeg sitter igjen med bare biter

av ord. Små ordbiter jeg samler opp og prøver å sette sammen,

mens damene rundt meg prater og prater. Som om de aldri

blir tomme. Som om de aldri har mistet ei søster, et språk.

En Route to the Raining Words Festival

2011-06-01T22:57:00.015+02:00

So here I sit at 5:00 a.m. at gate 19 of the Bodø airport, viewing with skepticism the tail end of a tiny Widerøe plane that may be the one I am taking to Leknes forty-five minutes from now. I can see 3 windows, which means it has at least 6 seats. There are already three of us waiting in the transit lounge. With no assigned seats available, it could be a bit like a rush toward musical chairs once we are given the go ahead to board.

It is a very small plane. When was the last time you saw a man stand beneath an airplane wing and reach up manually to twirl the four-blade propeller? He sets it going like a languorous windmill, then releases something that looks like a very large rubber band. That’s our plane. Very small.

I get the mac airbook out of my purse because, although I am on the first stretch of a long writing adventure, I have forgotten a notebook. I did grab a bic pen before leaving the house and it is in my purse, but I have nothing to write on here but this computer.

Don’t worry, there are journals in my suitcase. Several of them. For different moods and purposes. There is the small paperback adorned with Van Gogh’s sunflowers that I bought at the National Gallery in London. The sleek brown paper jacketed one from the Japanese paper outlet in the Boston airport last August. The black hardback sketchbook that I bought over a decade ago in Madison, Wisconsin and carried from there to Hawaii; then from Hawaii to Bodø; then from Hestdalen to Lyngnes the cabin in which, for a few years, all the hytte gjester wrote short accounts of their stays and the children drew outlines of their outstretched hands. With its 500 blank pages it was going to provide for the long line of hyttebok entries that would be handed on to posterity, along with the idyllic piece of real estate that was the cabin.

The black sketchbook returned to Hestdalen via Galnåsmyra 18B when Trond sold the hytte and moved to Bergen last fall. I turned it upside down and began journaling in it from the back. I figure by the time I reach the pages where the hytte entries are, I will be ready to read them. For now I avoid anything more than a glance at them when I open the sketchbook to the right orientation: backward from the blank pages that would have been the end of the cabin’s story, toward the handful of pages that contain different renditions, in crayon and Mont Blanc ink, of a family’s last attempt to claim a common ground on the piece of paradise that was Lyngnes, the cabin at the foot of Steigtind.

Three journals are in my suitcase, each suited for a different kind of writing this weekend. It will be a long weekend. It is Wednesday morning and I will return by another tiny airplane on Sunday night. I hadn’t planned to stay so long, but there is no way out of Lofoten on a Saturday afternoon. No way out on a Sunday morning either. It was Friday night or never. But Friday night would have meant leaving in the middle of the Tett På, Roy Jacobsen in Conversation with Finn Stenstad, and before Ord for natten, Kjell Arild Pollestad interviewing Torgeir Bygstad about his translation of the Roman poet Catullus. Why go to the Reine Ord Festival, certainly why spend Thursday night there, if not to attend these Friday night events? Why go to the festival at all if you return by the last plane on Thursday, which will cause you to miss the opening ceremony. No, it isn’t easy to get out of Lofoten by air, but one look at the steely gray white-capped sea told me to avoid the ferry at all costs. So it is little propeller plane there and back, when little propeller planes are in operation.

Did I really have to leave the house at 4:30 this morning in order to arrive in time for the writing class with Vigdis Hjort, which starts at 5 p.m.? You bet. This time frame says something about how close to the end of the world Reine is. I will get to Leknes at 6:10 a.m., wait four and a half hours for the bus to Reine, during which time I will make my way to the bus stop which is a few kilometers away from the airport. Then I will proceed by bus for one and a half hours to Reine, where another walk of some kilometers will get me to the Rorbu. The process repeats in reverse on Sunday afternoon to catch the 9 p.m. flight back to Bodø.

I have learned the hard way (at JFK in 2003 when I almost missed Ben and Grace’s LA wedding) to keep an eye on the transit lounge. If I seem to be the only person waiting for a plane there could a mistake. Sure enough, the little propeller plane took off to Trondheim with the two men who were sitting here. It is now 5:32 and the area around me at gates 19 and 18 is empty. I walk past a hundred or so vacant chairs to find the display board. Yup, they have changed the gate to 16. But the waiting area at gate 16 and 17 is also empty. I take a seat close to the gate desk, find the chair is covered with cheese puff residue, and move to a seat in the next row. I just settle down with my airbook to continue writing as a woman in a disco-glow-yellow jacket appears at the desk.

Are you going to Leknes?

Yes. I put away the airbook and approach the counter. Hee hee, am I the only passenger? A something-is-wrong feeling falls over me, the one I always have when I arrive someplace ahead of schedule, i.e., on time.

Oh no! she chirps. There’s supposed to be another one around here someplace. Værsågod!

She glances at my boarding card and I pass through the exit doors as she gets on the intercom to lure the other passenger to the proper gate. I step onto the tarmac where a feisty wind whips my hair around my face, stylishly I hope, as I walk toward the flying machine with the sun glistening over the mountaintops and the pavement sleek with last night’s rain. I imagine this is how presidents and kings must feel when you see them on the evening news entering or leaving airplanes just like this, out in the open, instead of through those accordion tunnels that attach to the airplane with a rubber seal. I feel like I should turn and wave to the cameras as I step onto the aluminum stairway.

Three steps and I am in the cabin. A man who looks like he could be the pilot greets me. There is no rush, no musical chairs, the airplane is my oyster. I can choose any seat I want. I choose 2F, which puts me in direct line of the arctic wind tunneling in through the open door. As the steward passes by I venture to ask if he has a blanket, and am a bit surprised that he actually produces one, wrapped in sanitary plastic. He rips open the edge of the packaging and offers the blanket to me the way Humphrey Bogart might have offered a cigarette to Lauren Bacall. Then he does the next gentlemanly thing and pulls an accordion door shut across the open door to block the wind.

The other passenger arrives, a foreign looking young man in a sweatshirt. He finds a seat in the next to the last row at back of the plane across the aisle. He’s done this before, knows that he is expected to sit directly opposite me to balance the weight of the plane. We are off.

Where do you usually look during the safety demonstration of how to buckle a seatbelt, slip on a life jacket, and find the nearest emergency exit?

Where do you look if you are one of only two passengers this demonstration is intended to save in the not so unlikely event this tiny aircraft falls from the sky or misses the short runway?

Do you go on reading your book?

Do you look out your window at the sun rising over the mountain peaks?

Do you look out the opposite window and ponder the propeller whose slow laborious turns are making the airplane shudder?

Or do you give your polite attention to the humble steward, even look him in the eye and smile as he blows into the red tubes that will inflate your life vest should it not do so automatically? Will you do this so he does not have to feel embarrassed for performing safety pantomimes at the front of an airplane that is empty but for you at the front and the bloke at the back?

I had not quite come to terms with myself on this question when the plane began putt-putting down the runway and, against all laws of nature, we took off. I imagined us looking like a cartoon: a determined frown on the nose of the plane, the tail thumping against the ground as the machine lifts and roars.

Yes, roars.

The tiny plane roars.

Otherwise everything about the trip is normal, the same as it would be on a real airplane. The steward tours the aisle, looking to his left at me, to his right at the other guy, checking our tray positions and seatbelts. The captain comes on and greets us with temperatures and flying time. Informs us that refreshments are available for purchase. One thing is very unexpected: when the fasten seatbelt sign dings off the steward is on his feet offering small dark chocolates from a plastic bin. It’s one of the few times I’ve been given free food on a Norwegian airplane.

If you have ever thought that airplane lavatories are small, try to imagine one so small there is no room for a sink. Only a dispenser of handy-wipes on the wall next to the toilet paper. To the right of the toilet a wall-to-wall mirror you can hardly turn to see into, because the floor space is the width of your foot.

When we land the plane no longer looks so small. That is because the Leknes airport is like a toy, everything compromised to fit within reach like in a play kitchen. Here we have the all-in-one-security-control-cum-baggage-drop to the right of the single glass ticket window. To the left, a short conveyer belt where a little yellow light flashes signaling the arrival of two mailbags, a stack of newspapers and my suitcase.

My fellow passenger disembarked with nothing but a white envelope in his hand. I considered asking if he was heading to Reine, perhaps I could hitch a ride, but he walked with purposeful strides straight through the airport and out the other side. I gathered that he was not going to the Reine Ord Festival. If he were he would have a suitcase, though not necessarily as full as mine which is sporting an orange “heavy” tag like a medallion.

Yes it is heavy. Full of provisions for the 5 days. Fruit, peanut butter, fresh bread, tins of peppered mackerel, freeze-dried tortellini, a pot of honey, tea, muffins, pretzels…; the aforementioned journals, jewels and rings to accommodate any mood or outfit, one pair of shoes, a rain jacket, thirty exam papers to grade, Overalt bor det folk, poems by Thomas Marco Blatt, Jean Paul Sartre’s Words, three books on writing, my rune stones and some clothes. Nah, I don’t think the guy with the envelope is going to the Reine Ord Festival.

A postman has fetched the newspapers and mailbags, and sits down with his hands behind his head waiting for something to come out of the storage room. I figure he is local and ask him if he knows where to catch a bus. He thinks hard, hesitates, then says:

That’s way downtown.

Can I walk there?

I see he is making a polite effort to avoid giving me the once over as he considers the distance to the bus station in terms of my person.

A good twenty-minute walk. Who knows what time they open, he adds, shaking his head. It is clear he considers this beyond my capability.

In the back of my mind I am hopeful that his bleak rundown of the situation will result in him offering me a ride into town in the mail truck. Instead he nods toward the ticket counter-cum-baggage-drop-cum-security-control. Ask him. There is no “him” at the security-check-in-multi-post, but on the other side of the security area there is a group of chairs that seem to serve as a café-cum-boarding-gate. I do not dare to walk through the unattended security scanner with my steel-heeled shoes and liquid toiletries. I sit down, fish out my airbook and go back to writing this. It is, after all, not yet 7 a.m. and the bus leaves at 10:45. Even if I do end up walking to town I have about four hours to do it in.

A three woman washing crew has arrived. One passes in front of me, unscrewing a bottle of fizzy water as she marches up to a potted plant and empties the contents into the soil. She returns to rummaging through plastic bags and another woman carries a half empty bottle of water up to the plant with the same mission. Once is odd, twice is weird. What kind of plant care have these women been trained in? Then I see that the bottles are from the bin in front of security. They could contain gasoline! Nitroglycerin! Too dangerous to allow through security, but the two green plants that adorn this Lilliputian airport apparently thrive on them.

The only people I see who are not obviously engaged in earning a living from the airport are a little old lady and little old man who sit chatting right inside the door to the airport, legs and arms crossed, relaxing. There is a suitcase parked next to them. Are they waiting to leave the airport like I am? They are not going through the ticket office/baggage drop/security control. Are they waiting for someone to arrive by plane? If so, why the suitcase? Either way, they might be heading into town and could offer me a ride to the bus stop.

Excuse me, are you from around here?

They glance at each other and grin as if here it is again, the question that has followed them through a lifetime and which they still don’t know how to answer. (Sort of like when someone asks me where I come from.) They say something to the effect of being from a different Lofoten hamlet but they come here occasionally, usually only when they are leaving.

I am not sure if that means they are going into town or not.

I play dumb, ponder aloud if buses indeed ever stop at the airport, and where are the taxis? They look out the window and assure me that there is a sign attached to the side of the airport that sports a drawing of both a bus and a taxi.

I thank them and try my luck with the one remaining washerwoman who has been humming a melodic tune while mopping the bathroom.

Do you know where the buses pick up? I’m going to Reine, you see.

She waddles over to the window of the ticket counter on which a bus schedule is taped. I know this document. I have spent hours poring over it on the Internet, trying with my best travel-agent-skills to coordinate a connection between planes and buses and boats on this archipelago. So when she says the bus leaves at 8:50 I know she is wrong. There was no bus before 10:45.

Are you sure that is the bus to Reine?

Oh yes, she nods.

It doesn’t say Reine.

It’s the same direction.

What about this one that says Reine? I point out the bus to Å. Does it come to the airport or do I need to get it downtown? If so, how does one get downtown?

It seems the question has never arisen in her mind before, but she is able to pass through security with impunity and get The Man.

That’s a kilometer! he says in a grave voice, shaking his head. Should we call you a cab?

A kilometer? What am I an invalid? Isn’t it a kilometer I walk to school everyday?

My suitcase has wheels. Just point me in the right direction please.

It is now 7:40. I retrieve my jacket and gloves from the suitcase, make a trip to the potty and head out the door where the washerwoman, now sweeping the steps, repeats The Man’s directions.

Just follow the road down the hill and around to the right. The main road. Well there is only one road. You’ll see a bakery. It opens at 7.

I thank her and look around for the ramp. Will I have to carry my 23 kilo suitcase DOWN the stairs? She points to the wall where two sharp 90-degree turns will lead me onto a wheelchair ramp. She is still sweeping as I pass by her again.

It’s just there beyond the green, she says, meaning the dark forest in the opposite direction of where she has told me to follow the road. But there is no shortcut, you’ll have to follow the road around and then double back.

No problem! I smile with a wave and trundle the suitcase away, feeling like Dorothy heading down the yellow brick road

If the rain doesn’t come you’ll be fine! she shouts with an encouraging smile.

Rain? To my right, over the fjord, I can glimpse sun and blue sky. To the left, as if skewered onto the tops of the mountains, are peppery granular clouds. They are far away. It won’t rain.

Anyway I have a raincoat on.

I proceed down the road, which is downhill, luckily, because 23 kilo plus my purse with the mac airbook, is a lot for one wrist to pull. In case Washerwoman, The Man, and Little old couple are watching, I wait until I am out of sight of the airport to switch arms. Ok, I can tell it is going to be a rather long walk, but this is Norway. People walk. If my feet end up hurting what’s new? My feet have hurt for years. Probably the last time my feet didn’t hurt was when I was fourteen years old. I notice there are very light drops of rain falling, but take courage from the fact that the cars that pass me do not have their wipers on. It can’t be raining much.

I have just reached the bottom of the hill and am about to switch arms again when I sense the approach of a vehicle behind me. It is a white bus the size of a reclining skyscraper. TOUR BUS is written across the top. It is moving slowly, but to match my pace it stops with a loud release of hydraulic pressure. The driver regards me through the door with a mixture of concern and amazement on his face. I nod at him and smile to signal that I know what I am doing.

He opens the door. Wha the—

I’m going to Reine! I say. I mean to the bus station to get the bus to Reine. Then just to confirm that I have gotten my facts straight I add, It leaves at 10:45!

That’s right, he says. I suppose I can take you there. I don’t usually go there. Get on in.

By “there” I believe he means the bus station, not Reine, which is an hour and a half away. For a brief insane moment I want to say, No that’s okay, I am enjoying the walk! but it’s really raining now. I have been trying to bum a free ride all morning and now a luxury bus will drive me to the bus station free of charge. At least I think it’s free. I decide not to ask him if he is going to charge me as I heave the suitcase onto the first step of the bus. He reaches out instinctively as if expecting me to fall backwards onto the street.

It’s okay, I chirp. I’ve got it. The second step. The third step. Thanks a lot! I settle into the front most seat and try to catch my breath. Behind me two rows of blue velour upholstered seats stretch back as far as the eye can see. As the bus crawls forward the driver says he is really supposed to be going to Stamsund.

I have no idea where anything is around here, I offer jovially, balancing the suitcase on top of my feet. I just got here from Bodø! I’m going to Reine!

Was there anyone else on that plane?

Yup, one other guy.

I decide not to mention the white envelope and purposeful stride, nor the fact that the guy looked like an Arab, which would have made that flight even more absurd for freighting two foreigners at the crack of dawn to an airport from which there is no visible transportation out.

When the bus takes a right in a roundabout I am alarmed.

They told me to follow the road straight into town! I would have gotten lost here! The driver just shakes his head and repeats that he really is on his way to Stamsund.

The man has not just done me a favor, he has saved me from disastrous folly. Trying to walk a kilometer from the airport! With a suitcase! In the rain! In high heels! On a road that would have led me directly into the Lofoten wilderness!

The driver stops the giant white bus at a zebra crossing and points out the “bus station” which is what is known most places as a sheltered bus stop. There is the bakery that The Man said opened at seven. It has four tables, fresh cinnamon rolls, coffee and I am the only customer.

Do you have Internet? I ask the proprietor who definitely was the prototype for the father of Dennis the Menace. Same black glasses, same side part, same sharp nose and lanky frame. He looks at me and says he has Telephone Net.

You can try that. I’ve seen people sitting here using their computers so there must be some kind of net, he says.

It’s okay, I can use my computer without the net. I smile at him.

He looks bewildered by that concept.

Without the net I can focus on what I’m doing, I say. He blinks and retreats into a back room. Which is writing, I say out loud as I unwind the cord for my airbook. Writing, I say. I’m writing.

Don’t need the net. Need to focus. Three and a half hours until the bus comes. Maybe I can get this written before I get to the fishing cabin.

THEN I can get on the Internet!

OPPDRAG: Bypoet

2011-02-06T19:02:00.003+01:00

Hvordan innta en by og overvinne seg selv

For noen år siden så jeg en vitsetegning i The New Yorker av en mann som holdt en papirbunke i den ene hånden og med den andre rettet han en pistol mot vettskremte passasjerer på et fly. Bildeteksten lød: "Ta det med ro og ingen kommer til å bli skadet... jeg vil bare lese opp for dere noen av mine dikt!" Var det slik det skullle være å opptre som bypoet i Tromsø under Ordkalotten 2010? Ikke visste jeg. Da dagen nærmet seg, måtte jeg innse at jeg ikke ante hva det var jeg hadde sagt meg villig til å gjøre. Jeg visste bare at mitt oppdrag var å erobre ettermiddagsrute 42, altså lese opp diktene mine på en buss i rushtrafikk.

Sikkert gøy? Jeg så for meg … vel, det var vanskelig å se for meg noe annet enn at bussen garantert var fylt til randen av arbeidsslitne mennesker. Hvordan tre et dikt nedover hodet på en stakkar som sitter og svever i halvsøvn og bare tenker på middag, hvis han er i stand til å tenke på noe som helst? Ville han føle seg krenket? Hva om min diktopplesning vekket dårlige minner hos vedkommende, diktrelaterte traumer om den gangen han ble bedt om å redegjøre for levendegjøring i Rolf Jacobsens Landskap med gravemaskiner, noe som endte med at han rødmet som en rødbete foran hele klassen og mistet sitt siste håp om noen gang å imponere søte Solveig? Ja, kunne han da bli aggressiv?

Like ille var min fornemmelse om det stikk motsatte: at jeg deklamerte min poesi i midtgangen på en smekkfull buss og ble fullstendig oversett, i beste fall betraktet sidelengs, som man gjør med en fyllik man ønsker skal gå sin vei og plage en annen. Ja, hvordan skulle dette egentlig gå?

Det var en trøst at jeg fikk den erfarne bypoeten Irene Larsen som opplesningspartner. Da vi møttes på den lille kafeen helt innerst i Tromsø bibliotek, utstrålte hun ro. Likevel hadde hun heller ikke helt bestemt seg for hva hun skulle lese. Å være rolig tross usikkerheten måtte være den perfekte holdningen, tenkte jeg, og satte i gang med å plukke ut korte og lettoppfattelige tekster. Temaet for festivalen var Karavane, noe som var lett å forene med mine dikt om å være innvandrer til Norge.

Det var halvannen time før Rute 42 hadde avgang. Skal vi bare gå litt rundt i byen først? spurte Irene. Ja, så klart, sa jeg. Best å late som om jeg visste hva hun mente, tenkte jeg. Finner det nok snart ut. Irene rakte meg en gul refleksvest som Nordnorsk Forfatterlag ville bypoetene skulle gå med, for å synliggjøre forfatterlagets virksomhet. Jaja, det kan jo skape en viss respekt på bussen at vi ligner på billettkontrollagenter, tenkte jeg. Samtidig ville refleksvesten beskytte meg mot min egen tendens til å ta meg selv altfor seriøst. At vi virket nokså latterlige, gående rundt med refleksvest midt på en solrik høstdag i Tromsø sentrum, ville også lette andre folks syn på oss; ufarliggjøre oss på en måte. For å forsterke dette inntrykket, lånte vi en svart tusj fra bibliotekskranken og skrev ”GODKJENT BYPOET” på vestene før vi tok dem på oss.

Utenfor biblioteket sto to damer i en livlig samtale med hverandre. Det var noe sydenturaktig med dem, og jeg var i ferd med å gå rett forbi, men Irene stoppet. Hei, sa hun, vi er fra Nordnorsk forfatterlag i forbindelse med Ordkalotten, en litteraturfestival som foregår denne uken her i byen, og vi lurte på om dere ville være interessert i å høre på et par dikt? Ja! sa de og smilte.

Oj. Så lett. Var det slik man gjorde det? Irene nikket til meg, et tegn på at jeg skulle lese først. Ja, men hadde de virkelig lyst til å høre et dikt? Hva om de bare sa ja fordi de var av den type menneske som aldri hadde lært å si nei? Hva om de ikke forsto noe av det jeg sa? Å så dum jeg følte meg! Men Irene så ut til å ha tillit til meg, så jeg åpnet permen min. Lot som jeg visste hva det betydde å være en godkjent bypoet. Jeg leste et dikt.

Damene fulgte godt med. De nikket og smilte og flirte på alle de riktige stedene. Så ble jeg ferdig og Irene leste ett av sine dikt. Takk, takk! sa damene. Takk så mye! De klappet, de smilte, ja, de strålte rett og slett. Hu hei om ikke de ble glade av diktene våre! Sånn var det å være bypoet, så herlig!

Vi fortsatte nedover gaten. Der sto det en liten gruppe reisende med kofferter i hendene. Skal vi spørre dem? Kanskje de ville høre på et dikt? Idet vi nærmet oss dem, suste de av gårde i en drosje. Jaja, sånn kunne det også gå. Vi så oss litt rundt. Der satt det et nyforelsket par på en benk. Tro om de ville høre på et dikt? Nja, det var ikke så lett å få deres oppmerksomhet allikevel. Men solen skinte og det krydde av folk i byen. En enslig mann sto på ei trapp og tok seg en røyk. Kanskje han ville høre på et dikt? Joda! Det ville han gå med på. Vi leste og han tok langsomme drag av sigaretten med haken løftet i profil og øynene halvlukkede. Så deilig det måtte være å høre på dikt!

Vi fortsatte nedover Storgata, på jakt etter flere som ville høre på et dikt. Der sto Ordkalottens selveste Morten Wintervold. Han lot som om han skulle til å gå sin vei da vi kom traskende ned gågaten. He, he, Morten, du må jo høre på et dikt! Ja, det ville han så klart. Han smilte og virket fornøyd både med det vi leste og vår originale vri på refleksvestene. Der var Mari Boine i ferd med å avslutte en mobilsamtale utenfor Kafé Sånn. Ja, hun ville så gjerne høre på et dikt! Og da vi leste inne på kafeen, kom hun og satte seg og hørte på diktene våre en gang til.

Slik gikk vi fra det ene gatehjørnet til det andre, opp småveier og ned alléer, innom alle slags hus: rådhuset, skobutikk, matvarebutikk, frisør, elektriker, restaurant og utallige kafeer, som om dette var noe vi gjorde hver fredags ettermiddag. Overalt fant vi folk som var interesserte i å høre på dikt. De lyttet. De stilte spørsmål. De ville vite hva vi het og hvem som hadde skrevet disse diktene vi leste. Jøss! Har dere skrevet dem selv?!

I en bitte liten butikk som bare solgte tråd, knapper og metervare, ble vi møtt med skepsis av ekspeditrisen. Dette var visst høyst uvanlig. Det var rett og slett uhørt. Hun hadde aldri før blitt spurt om hun ville høre på et dikt. Hva var det vi egentlig mente og hvor mye måtte hun i så fall betale? Det var jo ingen forpliktelse, sa vi, og skulle til å forlate butikken, men hun ville ikke slippe oss heller. Det var noe insisterende i hennes mørke og forfjamsete blikk. Hun ville begripe oss. Kanskje var vi to romvesener forkledd som mennesker i refleksvest, men jammen skulle hun få med seg hva vi mente med vårt spørsmål om å høre på et dikt. Da vi endelig begynte å lese, la hun ned saksen og lente seg mot oss på bordet hvor hun hadde holdt på å klippe stoff. Hun lyttet og kikket på oss med en usedvanlig intensitet. Da vi ble ferdig rettet hun seg opp og nikket smått med hodet, taus i den slående stillheten som er diktets ettervirkning. Denne gangen var det vi som måtte takke. Så forlot vi den lille butikken og fortsatte videre.

Da var det tid for å komme seg på Rute 42. Velkommen! sa den smilende bussjåføren som tydeligvis hadde ventet oss. De har gitt meg feil buss! Denne bussen er uten mikrofon! Vi konstaterte at å lese opp våre dikt på en stappfull buss i rushtrafikk uten mikrofon var ingen god idé. Vi ble litt reisesyke bare med tanken om å gå opp og ned midtgangen i et forsøk på å lese til enkle passasjerer. Ved neste holdeplass sa vi adjø til den smilende bussjåføren og gikk tilbake til gatene. Vi fortsatte opp og ned hovedveier og sideveier, inn og ut av bygninger, inntil det begynte å mørkne og vi måtte få i oss litt mat før Irene skulle på et annet arrangement, og jeg måtte finne veien til flyplassen og hjem til Bodø.

Refleksvesten tar jeg på meg av og til nå i mørketiden, hver gang jeg kjører sparken til jobben. Dummer jeg meg ut når jeg farter ned lysløypa med BYPOET skrevet i store blokkbokstaver over brystet? Tja, kanskje det. Men vesten inneholder gode minner om en dag full av dikt i Tromsø by. Ikke minst er den en påminnelse om å ikke ta meg selv for seriøst. Og hva vet jeg... kanskje en mørk morgen før skoletid, når jeg dytter min spark over den grusstrødde veien forbi barneskolen, kommer en liten tass til å stoppe opp og betrakte meg undrende. E du bypoet? spør han. Ja, så klart, sier jeg. Vil du kanskje høre på et dikt?

Even the Unsung Song is Singing of Love and Farewell

2011-01-10T21:55:00.005+01:00

If I could spell the sound my mac makes when a message is sent I would write it down as the word that marks this moment as a ... milestone, turning point, new phase? not sure what to call it, but I have just informed my director that I am resigning from the choir.

The message is sent, so as of this moment, 20:42 10.01.2011, I am no longer a conbrioaner. To resign from Con Brio for no apparent reason is an audacious act. Con Brio has been in my life as a concept since 1977 when I first heard about Trond's choir trip to Berlin at age 16 to sing Brahm's Requiem. Con Brio took on immediate mythic proportions, with its renegade director Finn Norman, and the determination shown by half the choir travelling over two hours each way each week to meet; one week in Bodø, the next week in Mo i Rana.

My immediate reaction to hearing about con brio as a young university student in Aix-en-Provence, France, was to go and join the university mixed choir. Trond joined too and it was something we were always going to do together, sing in a choir. He soon dropped out. The same happened in Trondheim, but during the one year we lived there I got to sing Beethoven's Ninth in the thousand year old stone cathedral. At graduate school in Wisconsin I felt privileged to be the only non music major in the chamber choir.

As I go back through that history I see there is a gap of many years when I did not sing in a choir. Those were the Madison years, and I wonder if choir was something I only ever did in foreign environs. In Madison I sang folk songs, and did not join a choir for reasons I do not at this point know.

One thing I do know is that it was during my Madison years that I started seriously writing poetry. I worked at writing poetry. Perhaps I didn't have time for choir.

When I moved to Bodø in 2001 only a few days went by before I was in touch with Con Brio, via a project festival performance of Porgy and Bess. That is where I met Veronica. She had a different color nail polish on each toenail and could hear every nuance of intonation that the altos sang, or didn't sing, and informed the director about it. It is also where I first came across Ejner, whom I thought had a unique speech defect which enabled him to sing, but not speak normally. Poor man, can't form spoken words, what a miracle that he can sing them! Then I realized he could speak. He was just speaking Danish.

Ejner is in Con Brio now. Veronica is in Con Brio now. For the past so many years, Con Brio has been my one clear connection to the society, culture, country I live in. It was a privilege to be allowed to join. I was hardly good enough. Veronica, with her keen ear, thought at one point that I should be kicked out. But that was when I was ill and not functioning much. Fact is, I had a resonance in my voice that the director wanted, and I was the only woman he took in that autumn who did not come with the promise of an accompanying tenor or bass. In the ensuing years, I have learned more about singing than I have learned about anything else. Come to think of it, that is a significant observation. Since 2001 I have been primarily involved in learning music. Along with American and British history and culture, which I had to educate myself in for my job, song technique has been the focus of my life in Norway.

Suddenly it is not good enough. Suddenly I am ready to remove choir as the obstacle it is to my writing. Con Brio is a lifestyle choir, a hobby that becomes part of the way you live. About 5-6 weekends a year, 3-5 hours a week, go to rehearsal alone. It has been a wonderful life and lifestyle, but suddenly... I am not interested any more.

At Christmas Kazi read me her bachelor's lecture on the aesthetic experience. Hegel and Dewey's philosophical views of the same. At one point she said something that made me stop and interrupt her. "That is it," I said. "Now I know why people like me go around feeling the way we do." It was a profound moment, one I couldn't put words on. I can't even put words on what it was she said. But it had to do with the artist's inkling of the yet-to-be-achieved aesthetic experience. I understood in a fleeting yet profound instant, the the nature of our unrelenting, unquenched, nagging desire, the longing that makes us go around always, always, always, always, always thinking about one thing and one thing only: writing.

We are reaching, through every cell and nerve ending, toward that aesthetic experience. That is all we are, all we do. And when we don't do it, we are haunted by the not doing of it. Writing.

Every time I even write that word there is a hesitation. As if I am daring to name YHWH. It causes me to tremble, to break down in tears. "You never cry about music," said Veronica when I was discussing quitting choir with her and mentioned my writing. No sooner had the word gotten out of my mouth and I was weeping from that deep wordless place where the soul has its small tether to the body.

No, I don't cry about music, and yet I have been living for music. It is easy to pave a path of distractions and obstacles that encourage one's resistance to oneself. Somehow that is easier than walking bare breasted down the wide swath of your life.

Today I have given up my handhold on music. That swooshing email... that was the sound of me falling, no jumping with joy, off a cliff.

This time of year and the heart turns to thoughts of...

2010-08-04T16:06:00.003+02:00

... betrayal? Not exactly. Let's just call it change, personal growth, greener pastures, moving on in life.

My first thought of leaving her came several months ago. Our relationship felt, well, frumpy, drab, unexciting. I felt frumpy, drab and unexciting, and the obvious thing was to blame her. She just didn't do anything for me any more. I started to compare myself to others who seemed so much more satisfied. Our relationship measured up short. We weren't communicating. She didn't really see me anymore. Not for who I was or who I wanted to be. And her limited view of my potential was taking its toll. She was getting in my way. We'd been together a long time anyway. Years. Wasn't it time for a change? Isn't change good? Stagnation is a slow death, and we were stagnating.

I already had my eye on someone new. I had heard about her through a friend, you know the friend of a friend kind of thing. Rumor was she was available too. She sounded like just what I needed, a person who could see me for who I am, see me with fresh eyes, understand me, listen. Best of all, she had time.

My present relationship was being worn down by issues of stress, never enough time. I would get in touch, needing some support and confirmation, and she would more often than not say she was busy. Maybe she was busy, but what good is a relationship if the other person has so many irons in the fire that she is never able to give you attention when you need it most?

I felt ready to make the big move. Break off the relationship cold turkey. I was going to tell her personally. I owed her that much. I called and asked if we could meet (if not you'll never see me again, was the implication).

She said Yes, sure come over, when is it a good time?

Hmm, it sounded like she cared. That threw my plan a bit, but made me feel good. So I went over. We talked. She had time, or took the time, and well, I must admit I was quite quickly reminded of how well she understood me. I mean, after all this time, she did really know me better than I had given her credit for. We talked. I felt seen. We understood each other. I began to realize there is a lot to be said about longevity in a relationship. Stagnation is only when assumptions replace communication. And here we were communicating to beat the band. We did have a common vision and goals. When it came down to it, we did see eye to eye.

Without really telling her that I had planned to leave, I decided there was no reason to cast her off for another pie-in-the-sky prospect that may not turn out to be even this good.

I mean, if I left I couldn't just call in six months time and say I want back in. Here I am. I was wrong to leave. Can we pick up where we left off?

The thought was too humiliating to consider. Besides, she might then find me too changed. Our vision lost. How impulsive and rash I had been to even think of leaving her!

Luckily, I had not been such a coward that I just jumped ship. To my credit, I had called and we worked it out.

I told her I valued her role in my life. We smiled at each other and made plans to meet again before long.

Then I paid her.

I'm talking about my hairdresser of course.

New Impressions of the Old World

2010-08-04T15:16:00.002+02:00

Isn't travel supposed to widen your horizon, compound your views, enrich your multi-faceted take on the cultures you visit and not least live in? It seems that this time my month's sojourn in the USA served to confuse and confound, even dull my perceptions of both that place and this.

There is more I don't understand everywhere I go.

Is that my desk?

2010-07-29T22:44:00.001+02:00

My bulletin board at VSC is empty but for the stabbed pins scattered like a complex dot to dot. Maybe they would make a picture. Maybe they would make a poem. Maybe the river outside my window is really a creek or a stream. Everywhere you look there is an inadequate word describing something, and something begging to be said. But there is a gag on the world. Duct tape over the mouth of America.

It's down to hours now and everyone agrees that a month is nothing. Everyone remarks wide-eyed over how little they got done. Most say they know what they'll do next time. They've got their next retreat scheduled.

Maybe mine should be in prison. Solitary confinement never seemed such a bad thing to me. I mean talk about TIME TO WRITE!

Soon we will be served our last supper. Move 'em in, move 'em out. On Sunday other hopefuls will occupy our spaces. The painters have painted over their walls with white. The writers have filled the recyle bin. With bottles. They recycle bottles and paper in the same bin here. And the poets of a certain age have been drinking in the evenings on The Porch. There is another porch where the artists meet. It's the louder porch. Coming to the porch tonight? Kathy asks me. I say sure. I'll be packed up by then.

Two boxes of 17 lbs each sent - a relief. My suitcases should pass through okay now. Sent the rocks, the books, more books, an umbrella, scissors, anything that seemed heavy - gum! American gum weighs a ton. Value? the woman at the post office asks. Do you want a signature on that? Priority? Priority Express? There are only 3 lines on the customs form to list all the contents. I want to add "mini" to the candybars in order to diminish their value. Am I going to be taxed on this? Why do I feel guilty? I send the boxes off feeling like I've cheated someone, gotten away with something. I lied on the customs forms, of course. I mean, I don't know how many books there were... I tried to mentally eyeball them, counting books per inch. Value them at $90, which is also a lie. "They have no intrinsic value, anyway," says the lady at the post office, who is a very young very strict woman you would not want to be your first grade teacher. "Are we ready?" she says after I have mummified the boxes with tape. I have written "candy" next to "stones" because I can't waste a line on each of them. Maybe she'll think I'm an actual Norwegian who doesn't know the right way to say "rock candy". Did the same with "umbrella scissors" - let it appear like one thing. Please, boxes, just get there, nothing lost, because those books are irreplaceable, intrinsic value and all.

So it's getting to be time to say goodbye to Vermont. I'll never see these hills again. But that's okay. I wouldn't come back here. Not to exactly this place. My next retreat, if I can swing one, will be in a more secluded place. Smaller. More solitary. Confined. The kind of place where they leave your meals at the door for you to reach out and take in.

Like Hedgebrook.

Strike and Counterstrike

2010-06-01T09:45:00.002+02:00

the village of Hamar has sent school satchels to Gaza
and paper, reams of blank paper for making school books
and pencils
and pencil sharpeners
and rulers and erasers
all the crisp and shiny things a child of Gaza dreams of
when he dreams of school
and the promise of school
which is freedom

but Israel has stormed the boat
and slain the unarmed guardians of school supplies
forgetting that it was the hope of children
that gave them access to that land

here, the children tune into the morning news
watching, hoping for an escalation
of the strike
that will cancel classes
for the rest of the week
the year

what they dream of when they dream of school
is closed doors and books
absent teachers
discarded pencil stubs
all of which add up to a promise
of freedom

And there were wars and rumors of war

2010-02-20T15:58:00.005+01:00

Just in case my great grandchildren wonder, Yes, we did see it coming... and Yes, we did do nothing. Just like our grandparents before us.

When I was a kid growing up in the shadow of the nuclear power plants of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with a mother who loved to say (with a definite thrill) that it was not a question of IF the Reds were coming, it was a matter of WHEN the Reds would come... the events of WWII were already outdated, archaic, old fashioned. To put it short, they were in black and white.

In college years a more analytical eye was cast on the European rubble and we questioned our parents and grandparents, Why didn't anyone do anything early on to stop Hitler? What were all of you thinking? The answer was clear, until it was too late they were thinking quite simply that if they ignored him he would go away of his own accord. Burn out in the exhaust of his own rage.

History book writers make it all look so clear and logical, the signs of the times, the signals that the world was on the brink of another world war. But the people going about their daily business in the middle of it all didn't know how big a part of history they were making.

Since 2003, or was it 2001, (or 1990, or 1963, or already in 1947 when the rubble of European cities was still smouldering) that WWIII started? Einstein was wrong. He said that any war fought after WWIII would be fought with sticks and stones. So far we are a long way from blowing up the planet in one long crescendoing arms race. No, we are developing new levels of cleverness in warfare. Not in technology but in semantics. Not in strategy but in rhetoric. We do not go to war these days, we go on peace keeping missions. We do not invade to kill, we invade to advise. Our technology and strategy is the same as always: take our young, our strongboned young, our prime of life flesh and blood, line them up, shoot them down.

Respond to their demise with eyebrows crooked as question marks. Report their numbers like so many unforseen traffic accidents. We have five dead Norwegians. We have 15 dead NATO troops (don't worry about what the word "troops" actually means, we've changed that too) this week.

Buy your news coverage from a PR firm.

Politicians proclaim that a veiled woman shall not be seen on the streets of our free land, while third generation immigrants search for their roots with fanatical zeal and arrogant ignorant journalists fuel fanaticism's fire.

Those Were the Days, My Friend

2010-01-24T15:08:00.023+01:00

I think that was the first song I learned to play on the guitar. Play and sing all the verses to. I could actually perform Those Were the Days and did so once in duet with Nancy Farabee in front of the school assembly. Two little flat chested girls with braids singing a woeful tune of glasses raised in taverns of days gone by.

The first actual tune I learned to play, i.e. the first 3 chords I learned were "Gloria" (E-D-A) by who I don't remember, that rockus number, everyone knows it, or did then. GLOH-OH-OH-OH-OH-OH-RIA / G-L-O-R-I-A / GLOH-OH-OH-OH-OH-OH-RIA / G-L-O-R-I-A /... and so on. If there were more words to that song we never knew them. That was when I was in sixth grade, age 11, at Linden Elementary School in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It was the height of the cold war, Nixon was in Vietnam, and Oak Ridge was developing improvments on the atomic bomb. Everyone's father and a few mothers worked in the nuclear power plants. Grown-ups weren't allowed to talk to their families or friends about what they did at work.

It was in that hopeful period of United States history, before the country had turned age 200, in other words in the days of infant idealism, that folk music took over the minds of the young. Every generation gets its basic morality, politics and philosophy from its own particular breed of popular songs. Ours were Blowing in the Wind, If I had a Hammer, Day is Done, What Did You Learn in School Today, Early in the Morning. The voices that taught us how to sing (for every generation sings in its own style too, just listen to The Voice then turn on Grand Prix Junior and you'll see what I mean) were Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, James Tayler, Judy Collins and Joan Baez. Heavy rock versions of the tradition were found in Don McClean, Donovan, Seals & Crofts. Our idea of a beautiful musical experience required no more than an acoustic guitar and a wooden straight back chair. We seriously appraised each other's guitar picks.

Who is "we"? All of us. Most 11 year olds I knew wanted a guitar as much as they wanted a horse, and I was one of the lucky ones who got both. Eventually. I was thirteen before I got my horse, but at age eleven I got my second guitar, a good quality acoustic guitar that replaced the good quality but plastic one I had fallen in love with at the corner pharmacy in Clinton, Tennessee and convinced my parents to buy me when I was seven. At age twelve I got a teal green electric guitar and portable amplifier. But that was a deviation from the norm. The norm was nylon string acoustic.

I don't remember why or with what means my parents managed it, but when I was sixteen or seventeen I got my Sigma, a steel string acoustic guitar my mother insisted was the prime specimen among all the acoustic guitars for sale in Madison, Wisconsin. It was also the most expensive. Although not a hand-made guitar it was made by Martin, the premier maker of handmade guitars, and my mother was right. It did have a great sound. It must have been my father's executive privileges with the Chase Manhattan Bank that provided the funds. For while our family life was marked by constant money worries, somehow my parents got me that guitar.

I was in my born-again-Christian phase and morally opposed to all forms of material ownership. I seriously believed it was in the best interest of anyone not wanting to be found lukewarm and spewn out of God's mouth to own no earthly possessions. Yet I allowed myself to own two things. The maple rocking chair given to me by my mother that had belonged to her father, and the Sigma.

The church believed it was wrong to use instrumental music to praise God, so my guitar playing was the demarcation line of my eventual decline back into worldliness. I remember my sights were set on mastering If I were a Carpenter. For my eighteenth birthday my boyfriend, Dick Church, gave me Judy Collin's songbook containing gems like Mr. Tambourine Man, Maid of Constant Sorrow, That's No Way to Say Goodbye. Judy Collins taught me to sing.

This was the 1970s and I went off to France to study, my guitar in tow. Europe was full of young people crossing from country to country and town to town with a backpack and a guitar. One of those was the man I would marry. There is no doubt that the guitar playing was part of how and why we fell in love with each other. He sang Der Ute Der Inne and I thought it was the most perfectly written song I had ever heard. I sang my rendition of Fire and Rain and he said, Oh... her voice is like her eyes. I didn't need to know exactly what he meant to take it as a compliment. In our wedding the only song sung was by us, a Norwegian folk tune. He accompanied us on his nylon string acoustic because I couldn't trust my hands to not shake with nervousness, especially with a frayed B string that could have snapped at any moment.

It is one of the great ironies of that now ended marriage that after some 25 years of life together our children never heard us play the guitar together and sing. During the first ten years of our marriage we played and sang all the time. We were an item, our performance requested regularly in the living rooms of friends and relatives. We made appearances at the Sons of Norway lodges around Wisconsin and churches and retirement homes in Norway singing our folk songs. Once we sang for an audience of 1000 at an international festival at the University of Wisconsin in Superior. Dressed in Sami bunad (don't tell!) borrowed from a little old man and little old lady, Samis who emigrated to Wisconsin in possession of the costume of their forefathers. We sang songs like Byssan Lull and Kjerringa med Staven.

One of our signature numbers was The Troll Song, in which a troll is trying to confound a farmer he meets on the road. He tells the farmer bad news about his farm having burned down, his wife dying in childbirth and so on, but the farmer keeps outwitting the troll until sunrise, at which point the troll turns to stone (accounting for yet another magnificent North-Norwegian mountain) and the man returns home to find out that none of it was true. I sang the part of the farmer and Trond was the troll. I used to imagine singing that for little children and making them laugh, but we never did. I remember him saying once that after seven years you either should get better or quit. He thought we were stagnating musically, and quit. I didn't get better but I kept on a bit. I did a few gigs on my own at the Wild Hog in the Woods coffeehouse in Madison. It was a laid back place with a velvet hat in the back of the room near the tea pot where the audience could put in donations for the players. Once I got a sizeable chunk of money, twenty-five dollars which the wannabe beatniks running the coffeehouse said was the most they'd ever seen in the hat. I used it to invest in the luxury of an electric tuner.

I taught French in those days, and playing the guitar to accompany myself and the students singing French folk songs was another staple ingredient in my life. Yet, I remember clearly the transition that happened during the 80s and into the 90s: there came a time when my students no longer knew how to play the guitar. While being able to play a few chords on the guitar and sing along was as common among me and my peers as knowing how to swing a yo-yo, this new generation watched me play the guitar as if I were conjuring magic. They didn't play the guitar themselves, nor did they want to. They played Nintendo. The electric keyboard was the instrument du jour.

Since the turn of the century music performance has returned to the daily lives of young people, but now it is in the form of singstar and guitar hero. Karaoke in one form or another has replaced the protest songs of my youth. I see a fundamental difference. We didn't play and sing because we were particularly good at it, it was because we were in love with the songs we sang, we believed the lyrics were literally expressing the meaning of, well, life. Singing and playing the guitar was our most human activity, a form of communion. These days when kids get together at each other's houses, they sing in order to see who is best. Who can imitate the pop stars and make the red and blue blinking lights mount the highest. Singing is about winning Best Talent or Melodi Grand Prix. The essential components for making music are not a 6-string and chair, but a microphone and computer.

During this transitional period, this first decade of the new century, I have lived in Norway and my guitar has been more or less tucked away in the bedroom. I don't know why I got it out this winter, but seeing me play it a few times induced Veronica to give me a significant gift for Christmas: a stand, so the guitar could be out in the living room, out of its fiberglass case, available for playing. I don't know if she knows how significant and even symbolic that gesture was. It is the essential opposite of being told to either get better or quit. It said to me: just play, make some sound, have fun, enjoy.

I've been doing that. I sit down with the guitar and two hours can go by before I notice it, engaged in the valuable but much underrated-by-me activity of wasting time. I've been reviving some old songs, remembering some chords. Last night I took the guitar along to Linda's birthday party where there was going to be an open mic. I sang two songs; sure enough, the hand was shaking and the guitar playing fairly weak, but it didn't matter. I told them about the tradition I was coming from. A half dozen chords and a notebook scrawled full of lyrics. Afterwards it was nice to hear several people comment that it brought back faded memories of when Joan Baez was in Norway. One man, slightly balding and wearing a suit, stopped by my table. Balancing his cake and coffee cup he leaned down and told me he turned fifty this year and he and his buddies in Norway used to hang out with guitars singing one of the songs I had just sung. It was I Gave My Love a Cherry.

I don't know, there's just something awfully sweet about that. I suppose thirty years from now today's youth will similarly reminisce about the karaoke tracks of their day. But I know one thing, while they will laugh about the clunky digital boxes and wired gizmos their musical performances required, they won't have the physical memory of making music that we do. For we carried those song books and guitars everywhere we went, pasting stickers of the towns we passed through onto our guitar cases. We were anti-war and pro-folksong. Wherever we went in America or Europe we found others of our kind. We were part of an international brotherhood of young idealists meeting on street corners and in university campuses. We recognized each other by the physical marks of our fellowship: clipped nails and callouses on the fingertips of our left hand, long nails for picking on the right.

Eat Your Humble American Pie

2009-12-11T12:56:00.003+01:00

In a country where the motto "Don't think you're any better than the rest of us" permeates the collective psyche, the greatest of all sins is arrogance. Even though local news commentators seem unable to say the name Barak Obama without prefacing it with the appellation "The Most Powerful Man in the World" it has been generally expected here that Mr. Obama would show up at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony as a thoroughly appreciative guest of honor at his own party.

As the big day approached, it did not seem that he was. One by one, gala events were crossed off Obama's list. He declined lunch with the King, would not allow the press more than two questions, would not visit the exhibit honoring him at the Nobel Institute, and not make an appearance at the Children's Peace Prize ceremony, all tradition doings by Peace Prize recipients. His hosts began to feel, well, snubbed. It was as if you were preparing a party in honor of someone who told you he was going to stick his head in the door and say Thanks Guys! before hurrying off to someplace he'd much rather be.

It was not an attitude that did the Nobel Peace Prize justice.

On the day of his Oslo appearance, Obama did not seem ungrateful or unappreciative, but he did come across as a reluctant honored guest. His reluctance may account for his downplaying the celebratory elements of the event. Throughout the day he repeated the sentiment with which he first received news of his appointment as a Nobel laureate: Who me? In answer to the single question he allowed from the Norwegian press (how would he use the money), Obama said he knows for a fact that there are other people more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. He does? Maybe he should have been advisor to the Nobel committee, which concluded there was no one more deserving than him. He went on to say that if and when his actions prove that he deserved it, the prize would be justified and the criticism of it would wane. If his actions bear no fruit, he said, then all the prizes in the world won't disguise that fact.

Okay...

He also said that after listening to the Nobel Committee's chairman introduction of himself, he was almost convinced that he deserved the prize. This comment, given while proposing a convivial toast over the fancy post-prize dinner, elicited a jovial response from the well-appointed audience. Hear, hear! Cheers! Skål!

Why are these people laughing? This was not polite self-deprecation, the sort that passes for humility in western society. No, I think Obama was being quite sincere, as well as playing on his talent for cheerful charm. If he can get them all to laugh about this prize thing, well, then it's not such a big deal one way or the other is it?

It reminds me of my choir director putting her arms around me after our last concert and saying sotto voce, It could have been much worse! I was supposed to laugh and shake my head in agreement. Whoowee! We pulled it off, but boy, WE know we didn't deserve that ovation!

I didn't feel like laughing, because she wasn't joking. She knew as well as anyone that the concert was not our finest moment. It was okay, but not a performance that will go on record as a measure of our standard. So why did we do it? Why did we not wait until we were ready to deliver the best concert we could? It's a shallow victory to have gotten kudos we believe we didn't deserve. It lessens our own sense of self-worth and reduces our respect for the audience, our ultimate judge.

No one respects a judge who is too easily impressed by mediocrity.

That's the feeling I get listening to Obama's somewhat embarrassed acceptance of the most prestigious prize in the world. All the self-deprecating jokes in the world won't disguise the fact that he knows what we all suspect is true: maybe someone else should have gotten it. The situation calls for true humility, which takes strength of character and courage, not lame self-deprecating humor. If Mr. Obama indeed could think of more deserving recipients, the act that would have raised his esteem in the eyes of his enemies as well as his fans, would have been to decline the prize and say, You know what guys, I appreciate the gesture, I really do, but let's say we give it to ___________.

He would have to fill in the blank. I don't know who it would be, and apparently greater minds than mine don't either. Perhaps the truth is what one commentator ominously grumbled: if no one has done more for world peace this year than Barak Obama, what does that tell us about the state of world peace?

I remember the year W.H. Auden announced there would be no recipient of the Yale Younger Poets Award. He found no book written by a poet under age thirty worthy, he said, so the prize would not be awarded. Cries of protest raged against the unfairness of his judgment, mostly by MFA students under age thirty, but many people felt that he upheld the standard of the award at the same time as he put a challenge before the literary community: write better, raise your standards, because the award would not sink its own.

History will show, I am quite sure, that during these days following 9-11-2001, the events leading up to WWIII were unfolding. How, the readers of that history will ask, did people not see it coming? Why, they will cry, did no one do anything? How, they will ponder, did The Most Powerful Man in the War-Mongering World, qualify for the Nobel Peace Prize?

What were we thinking?

In 1983 I arranged to be smuggled into an Afghani refugee camp on the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan, on the border with Afghanistan. Why? The eyes of the world were there, focused on the brave rebels struggling in the dusty hills against the Great Satan occupying their country, the USSR. They were the mujihadeen, fighting with sticks and stones and American uzi machine guns to end Russian occupation of their country. They were under U.S. and U.N. protection. I had the opportunity, so I paid them a visit. It was an honor, a thrill. They were our heros. They were the Taliban.

Yes, THE Taliban.

And they were our allies, which mean they were fighting for peace. Then.

Obama is now sending 30,000 additional soldiers into Afghanistan to wrest control of that country away from the Taliban. His 30 minute audience with the Norwegian Prime Minister during his Nobel Peace Prize visit established Norwegian financial support for this effort. Norway has money, but very few soldiers. So far. They're working on correcting that lack. They want to be part of the game when The World's Most Powerful Man in the World wages war, backed by Nobel Peace Prize money, on The Most Dangerous Men in the World (Wanted: Dead or Alive!): the sons and grandsons of the men I drank tea with back in Peshawar, back when they were heros. Back when the Great Satan was the other superpower, the bad one.

Now it's just us. Just the one superpower. So we must be good, right? If we call it peace making, then it's not war, is it?

History will judge.

Late Breaking News! Rasma on the forefront of technological upgrade!

2009-11-26T10:28:00.001+01:00

Opera is hip, it's now, it's the web browser for the cutting edge of (mainly) young Norwegians with high amounts of student loan. A grassroots Norwegian invention, it was a maverick when Explorer was the mainstream. It must be at least five years ago that I first heard of it, from my computer nerdy electronics majors, boys with PCs wired to their nerve endings and brain lobes. When they said they used Opera my heart skipped a beat and I was a bit afraid for them, in a matronly manner. Later, my daughter, a media major, used it in her studies; then her department head showed me he used it to watch cricket matches and a hip young colleague showed me the wisdom of using different browsers for different websites, and a year or so ago I logged on.

Since, I have used Opera for various purposes, alongside Safari and Firefox at home and Explorer at my school office. It's a nice web browser, superior in certain features, but apparently I have not used it so very often, not often enough to have ever encountered the situation that arose this morning when I wrote the word "blog" and the Opera spellchecker underlined it in red. What the? I right clicked the word (or in Mac terms, double fingered it) and was given a exhaustive list of alternatives:

glob
bog
log
slog
biog
blot
bloc
clog
bldg
blob
flog
blow
b log
Ignore all
Add word

So I added it.

I, little ole Rasma Haidri, added the word "blog" to the Opera spellchecker dictionary. Yessirree, it was me.

Now, I don't even know if my action did more than remove the red line temporarily from my immediate piece of writing, or add it to my computer's cookie version of Opera, but let's assume the best. So, all of you nerdy cutting edge Opera users out there, fear not the spellchecker of Opera (which, since I haven't taken care of matters yet, also does not recognize the word "spellchecker") turning your "blog" into "glob" or "bog" or god help us "biog". I have put the word into the dictionary.

Whew. Good thing I was paying attention, huh?

And to all you trendy maverick urberintellectual Opera developers, as your potential English teacher let me say this: go back to school and learn to spell!

9th Grade Disco

2009-10-31T13:23:00.005+01:00

They go in matching outfits

white top black bottom

golden hair teased, no part

They walk in sock feet

sliding fast to keep up

with each other

round and round

in one door

out the other down the hall

in the first door again

round and round

the disco floor

The busty babe

in leather tights

tows a plain jane

in sweats

her best friend

who is best

because she will never

show her up

Outside the door

the two feet tall tough guys

in ski hats and layered tee shirts

pass packets of snuff

in and out of jean pockets

in wannabe cocain

furtiveness

There is something here

grown-ups will never

understand, have never

understood

because grown-ups

have never ever

been so young

PC or Mac? A rhetorical question...

2009-10-12T19:57:00.006+02:00

I've been whining so much at home these past few days I have used up my quota of good listening and so I turn here to continue my ranting and raving... bear with me! Or don't, but I shan't be dissuaded, I just have to plant my feet, throw back my head and let out a honest to goodness Charlie Brown AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!

The situation is my attempt and re-attempt to create a website for a person who shall remain unnamed to protect her innocence because she has absolutely nothing to do with the problem. It all started when she asked some months ago if I could make her a simple webpage to promote her consulting business. Why did she ask me? I had just made a couple of webpages for myself, which she liked. Why had I done that? Because I had just bought a couple Mac computers with the hard earned proceeds of my textbook and discovered the standard software iWeb that comes on every Mac. It's the kind of software that once you open it, out of simple curiousity to find out what it is, you cannot help but make yourself a webpage. It is all so beautiful and straightforward and appealing. Sort of like if you found yourself in front of one of those toddler toys with big plastic colorful shapes of stars and boxes and triangles and moons that fit into corresponding slots on a big plastic board. You're just compelled to reach down, pick up that orange circle and push it into the right hole and hear that satisfying plunk as it falls into place.

I got the webpage made and the domain name sorted out, then found out that my friend wanted to be able to update the webpage in a year's time on her own. Since it was made on Mac software she wouldn't be able to work on it. I told her no problem, I'd transfer it to PC software. We sorted out a web hotel and purchased the site generator program which, according to the support guy (with whom I have now had 5 correspondences), is (I quote): the most user-friendly on the market, with 500 templates to choose from so that anyone with no web design experience whatsoever can quickly and easily create and launch a personal webpage - (end quote).
Excuse me? Is he talking about iWeb? I felt I was one of the Jetsons asking how to program my house to make dinner and he was Fred Flinstone telling me how wonderful stone wheels were compared to those made of wood.
I first wrote to him because I was unable to upload a photo from my machine onto the webpage. The software directed me to a photo gallery owned by the software company where I could purchase a photo! Say what? Can't I upload my own frickin' photo? Nope, he replied. You can choose from one of our 500 easy to use templates... Some dozen hours later I figured out how I COULD upload my own photo to the website. I have purposely chosen to not inform the support guy. Let HIM figure it out if he wants to. I doubt he does.
Then I wrote asking him to explain the purpose of the "remove template design" button on the editing page. I see that it removes the template, but to what end? My guess was that I could then insert my own design, say a textbox or something brilliant like that. No, the template goes away and you can do nothing with the blank page (except purchase a photo from their photo gallery and upload that, with no background or formatting on the page, yeah right). His response was a remix of the same theme: There is very little freedom in the program to make it easier for someone to create their own website using one of our 500 templates...
I didn't tell him that I thought all his 500 templates look more or less alike. All the headers have either a smiling young business woman or a smiling young business man embedded in them. Can I embed my own image? No. Can I make my own header? Sure, but nowhere does it give you the specs it should be. It doesn't take your banner photo and make it fit the template banner. Oh no. You have to, in the end, hold a ruler up to your computer screen and eyeball the banner measurements. Then eyeball the same thing in Adobe Illustrator. Real user friendly.
Then I wrote asking about the flash intro, which has text rolling around in it that I couldn't figure out how to edit. It was fairly minuscule, but I still wanted to ensure that my friend's flash intro was going to say something relevant about her. Can I edit the flash intro? No, you can choose any one of the four flash intros that go with the 500 ready made templates...
This time he sent me the user manual as a pdf file. Brilliant. The software itself had no user guide, and the help button only got you to the manufacturer's website where you could, (yes, all together now), purchase a photo from their photo gallery and insert it into one of the 500 templates....
I was glad to get the user manual. Found a few helpful things in the first pages, and decided I would print it out so I could have it on my desk for reference. Hit the print button and my computer went wacko preparing the document.... 171 pages... no, something was wrong with the printer. I hit cancel and tried again. Same thing. My jaw dropped as I paged through the user manual. Yep. 171 pages long. The most user-friendly-software-made-for-any-idiot-to-use has a 171 page user manual??!! In it are instructions like this:
All replies you create in the Wizard are authored by Administrator. If you wish to add a reply under a different author's name, go to the site preview by clicking PREVIEW at the bottom of the page, navigate to the forum page in your site menu, and add a reply there. Having created a reply on the site, you can edit its main properties (see page 124) in the Wizard. If you are editing a form on a published site, republish the site (see page 164) so that your changes take effect.
Huh? Actually, I can understand that. Especially after reading it a few times and examining the accompanying diagrams (of which there are two, figure 74 and figure 75). Actually, I am pretty good at figuring this stuff out. Usually. I mean I'm a person (don't tell anyone) who actually used to enjoy filling out tax forms... you know, matching all the little codes and symbols with the corresponding instructions in the tax guide and getting it all to work out. It was satisfying to know they couldn't throw me with their bureaucrateese. I mean I was the kid in fourth grade who thought grammar was fun. I loved the schwa! I have a head for boring details!! And still, this project has about done me in.
If I hadn't promised my friend I would make her a website I would not have spent the last four days trying to remake it in PC format. If I hadn't gotten a Mac I would never have attempted to make a website at all, for anyone, ever. Not if this is as easy-and-user-friendly as it gets on a PC. It occurs to me that this 171 page user manual is symbolic of the basic difference between a Mac and a PC.
So, Mac or PC? If you don't know the answer to that question, you deserve to get this 171 page user manual dropped on your head!

P.S. Just for a breather, when I needed a break yesterday from the grueling labor of making a PC friendly webpage using the any-idiot-can-make-a-webpage-software, I made a new webpage for myself. Using iWeb of course. Check it out at www.rasma.no.

You do me, I'll do you

2009-07-13T08:55:00.003+02:00

Hi Rasma, subscribe me, I'll subscribe you back. FOLLOW me I'll follow you back. Just shout at me after you doing so. Thank you

That message came in my morning email, along with the Urban Word of the Day, a solicitation from eBayMotors (sell your vehicle!) and the Urban Myth Newsletter. It was from harisoyono, or something like that, sounding like a beauty salon blog - "Hair's YO or NO!" being the motto.

But what is this about - subscribe (TO - you dimwit!) me and I'll subscribe (TO!) you back ? Why? Isn't that like saying I'll barge in and listen to what you are saying over there at your coffee table if you barge in and listen to me?

No, I'm being unfair. Blogging is not the same as having a private conversation over coffee, I mean we are blogging to the world, right? But my dear friend har-is-oyo-no seems to want to add me to his-her charm bracelet of followers, put me in the stats as a way of making him-her-self feel important, connected to the world. Our stats, after all, are proof of how many people are tuning in, listening, being influenced by us.

Right?

Wrong.

I got an anonymous letter once. Written in red pencil on lined notebook paper. It looked like a girl's handwriting, made me think of a quiet freckled very tall girl with carrot colored hair who had been my student once but whose name I couldn't remember. She had been a fairly anonymous student and the anonymous letter-writer identified her-him-self as just that: I sat in the back of the room and never spoke, but I want you to know how much influence you had on me. I loved being in your class. You changed my life.

They say in advertising that one complaint equals eleven dissatisfied customers. When I got the anonymous letter I realized that some inverse principle of that rule is true in education. I already knew of the students who had told me outright that I had meant something to them, but this anonymous letter opened a new possibility... people whom I believed I had NOT influenced in a positive way (which was definitely the case for the carrot-topped girl who never spoke or hardly looked at me) ... there was at least one such person out there wearing my imprint on their life. The letter-writer could represent a scattering of others through the years.

None of whom read my blog. Or my poetry. Or my other writings...

Or do they? The point is I don't know. They might or might not, but of one thing I'm fairly sure: harisoyono wants to subscribe me, but will he / she / it read me?

Hmm, maybe I'll do a little test... there's only one way to find out!

Defending Private Space

2009-04-24T21:18:00.006+02:00

It used to be considered impolite to show up unannounced at someone's door, especially if you were a stranger calling at an odd hour. Traveling salesmen did it, if we can believe the movies, but they were the epitome of impolite, boorish, unwanted intruders.

It was polite in those days to call first. Unless you were an idiotic salesman, you called and asked if it would be fine if you stopped by. You gave the host a chance to know that it would be you ringing the doorbell at the appointed time.

People don't drop by in quite the same way any more. In fact, these days we are usually pleasantly surprised if someone does drop by unannounced. It is a rare event done by someone you know.

Today's equivalent of yesterday's boorish intrusion at the front door is, I realized this morning, the telephone call. It was 9:05 and I still hadn't had breakfast and class started at 10:00. I was juggling tea in a thermos and sandwiches for school with toast and tea in a cup for breakfast when the house phone rang. I dropped everything and went to answer... it would have to be my 13-year old daughter who couldn't reach me on my cell because I had the sound turned off, or some other family member with an urgent need, or maybe someone from my job. Otherwise the house phone doesn't ring. At least not at that hour.

Hey-ya this here's Stig Arild Slåbakken, yup, yup, from know-your-neighborhood yup, yup, at the local newspaper, ya so yup --

I was too taken aback to hang up or respond, I just lay the phone down on the sideboard and turned back into the kitchen in a trajectory that had been one seamless swoop from kitchen counter to phone on sideboard and back to kitchen. It was only as I heard Stig Arild yapping from the tiny amplifier in the phone -- huh? yup, huh? yup, yup... that I realized how angry I was at this idiot's invasion of my morning. He wasn't a telephone solicitor either, the kind we know (and some of you pity) as the modern door-to-door salesman trying to make a buck but down on his career-luck.

No, this was a local journalist.

As I fumed into the kitchen, weighing the risk of going without breakfast against the risk of being late to class, I briefly wondered if this had been a wise action on my part. This is a small town. I have been featured in the newspaper on various occasions for my writing, teaching, or as a local representative of Norway's growing population of foreign residents. Had he wanted to do a feature on my neighborhood? Did he get my name from someone? I had left the phone lying on the sideboard, left him talking stupidly into thin air until he realized he was talking stupidly into thin air and hung up. I let him pay for a long worthless phone call. Should I have been more polite?

A more generous person would have been, no doubt. But then I thought, balderdash! He should have EMAILED me! That is the new protocol. That is the new rule. That is the polite way to introduce yourself to a stranger you want something from: You email and ASK IF YOU CAN CALL THEM! Just like in the old days you called someone and asked if you could drop by.

It seemed I had hit upon an brand new urban truth, an insight of no little sociological consequence. But later as I related this to Veronica she said, Yeah, too bad there isn't a public register of email addresses.

Of course! Public directories are geared so that anyone can approach you on the phone (where you can't identify them before having to deal with them person-to-person) and no one can get the necessary information to email you, where you will have full control over the choice to pursue the contact or delete them from your life with the push of a button.

Poor Stig Arild. Maybe he had wanted to email me and ask if he could call, maybe he had tried many avenues of finding my email address and only in the bitter end did he resort to the intrusive phone call. Poor Stig Arild. Maybe he had spent the rest of the day agonizing over the fate of his feature article. Poor Stig Arild with his tiny voice in the plastic receiver going huh? yup? yup huh yup?

Well, if it was that important he'll call back.

Computer Literacy

2009-04-22T17:36:00.007+02:00

I'm not sure what it says about the world or the next generation when I ("at my age!") have better computer skills than my young adult students. We had exams today, five hour essays, written on the computer and posted on a internet learning platform. Here are some of the struggles students have had because they...

1. own a Mac but no word processing program for Mac

2. have Open Office Org version 1.0 and wonder why spellchecker in English doesn't work

3. (related to 2) don't know that when the software you are using asks if you want to update you should say: Yes, please

4. don't know that when Explorer asks if you want to upgrade you should say: Yes, please

5. refuse to download a word document from a task on our textbook's webpage for fear of virus attack

6. can't get their head around that an Open Office Org document can be saved in a .doc format

7. believe that anyone off the internet street can edit a wikipedia article by typing on the article itself

8. don't know what a header is

9. don't know how to run spellchecker

10. don't know how to right click

One of the topics we studied in international media was internet censorship and blogging. Not one of my students (average age 19 in that class) has a website, has a blog, knows how to make a blog, has even thought of making a blog, reads blogs.

In case you are thinking this is because we live in the backwoods of the world up here just south of the north pole, Norway is highly technological. The number of personal webpages per capita in the late 1990s was higher in Norway than in any other country in the world.

What has happened? When I expressed surprise that none of them had a personal website they asked if I did. I have three or four, I said. At last count.

One of the students, a girl in her early 20's, looked puzzled for a moment and then said, But why?

Well, I said, I've got different ones for, gee let's see, my writing, my publications, my blog, my poetry blog, my photo blog, my writing course...

Then she looked positively crestfallen and said, Nothing about teaching us?

Not yet, I said. I'll get to it.

So here you are. One of the reasons I don't write about my teaching is that it could embarrass if not outright compromise identifiable individuals. But, hey, what was I thinking? I can write about them all I want.

They'll never read it.

Easter anno 09

2009-04-12T17:39:00.021+02:00

We've hiked in the mountain. We've sat in the sun with our café latte. Now it's time for an Easter egg. The chocolate covered almond variety, or a solid egg of Norwegian chocolate, better than Swiss, better than Hershey, Norway's best kept secret. Normally by this time of day we would have overdosed on chocolate, but this year there has been no egg hunt and thus no eggs. Neither was there mahjong or the breakfast buffet. For the first time in some twenty years there are no children in the house to hunt the eggs and play the mahjong. No children to place bunnies strategically throughout the living room on Easter Eve, marking the spots where the Easter Bunny should place the eggs. So the errant EB left all the chocolate hanging in a plastic bag on the back of my study door, of all places. Now I've found them, some of my marzipan favorites are there too, so we're going to make a nice coffee and watch a film and have a taste of Easter.

This year we could have had an egg hunt outdoors, no snow for the first time in forever. We did go out and cut down willow and birch branches on which to hang the decorated eggs. The ones the girls and I decorated over the years are in the foyer window. Veronica's artistic assortment is in a giant orange blown glass vase in the living room. This year she made several more, a few in the outer space theme: a UFO, sorry, UFEgg, and a solar system; as well as one sporting the word MEAT and covered with pictures of raw steaks and chops and other protein sources... ahem, and then the one she made for me. She asked me one day what was the most surprising thing that could come out of an egg. I dunno, a paper hat? I said. So today I got the egg, broken in a spiral with a small effigy of yours truly emerging from it, wearing a paper hat. Fabergé ain't got nothing on this gal.

Close your eyes, you will hear Norway

2009-03-08T09:49:00.006+01:00

Veronica Jane Preiss playing a Norwegian folk tune arranged for oboe and organ by Henning Sommerro, at midnight in a wooden church... It's a rehearsal for New Years Mass, and I was the only one listening, me and my hand held camera, what a privilege.

Judy, in memorium

2009-02-01T21:48:00.005+01:00

I have been thinking about my friend Judy Strasser, who along with me and three others founded a poetry manuscript group in 1989. We were five women who wanted to be serious about our writing. We were strangers to each other, but had somehow heard about each other and hooked up because of a mutual desire to take our writing seriously.

I was the youngest and, I believe, the only one who had not published anything. Yet I matched the others in determination to get somewhere with my writing. Each of us had a personal variation on our writing goals, but we wanted the same thing: To write. To find her voice. To write and make herself heard, then to listen so she would know who she was.

Sue Wicks soon moved back to England and the four of us continued. Robin Chapmen, Alison Townsend, Judith Strasser and me. We met alternately at Judy's or Robin's or Alison's house, never mine and I don't remember why. I can only imagine it had to do with some awkwardness I felt about my husband. He was supportive enough but, well, he took up so much space in the house it seemed stuffy to try to have the manuscript group there. Judy, Robin and Alison were divorced. Their houses were women's houses. Open and airy and free to sit up in until all hours with no television on in a distant room, no husband shuffling through and eating from our cakes, no big men's shoes to stumble on as we came and went.

Judy had a cabin in Door County, Wisconsin, which we used for a summer poetry retreat. I think I wrote my first poem there, come to think of it. I had a little tiny bedroom in the upper floor of the cabin, and as I was about to go to bed the stink of a skunk came wafting through the screen of the window. It was a night in June, dark, cicada filled. I was immediately thrown back to a memory from my childhood in Tennessee, when skunks used to come around our lawn at night and my mother would gather us in the window to watch them.

I wrote a poem called "Family" and it was my first publication. Came out in a journal in Kentucky. Sometime after that Judy had been away somewhere and brought us all back little gifts. Mine was a ceramic worry stone, glazed with an image of a skunk. Looking back, the time spent at Judy's cabin was fundamental to not only my writing, but to those central years of my adulthood. I was at the age when you are supposed to know everything and think you do, but are starting to get a faint inkling that maybe you don't. It rocks the foundation. If you don't know everything your parents didn't either. Soon the cornerstones of age and maturity and wisdom crack and crumble and mingle into rubble, a new gritty stuff from which you build the rest of your life. This time knowing it is right to have questions that aren't answered.

When our poetry group started in 1989, Judy had just gotten divorced. She wanted to turn her diary of the last year of her marriage into a memoir called Black Eye, but it was not something we heard much about. We were strictly poets, anyone writing prose had to join some kind of parallel manuscript group. The literary atmosphere at that time was that you either belonged to one camp or another, poetry or prose, but not both.

Judy belonged to both. She showed me early on that both were possible from the same voice. She wrote radio scripts too, she was a program host on To the Best of Our Knowledge on national public radio. She wrote grants. She wrote essays. When we sat discussing diction in poetry, she always had her 3 volume hard cover set of Oxford dictionaries at hand. From Judy I learned a deep respect for words. I am pleased that one of Judy's last published pieces appeared in an anthology alongside mine last year. Both of us were writing about the poetry manuscript group. About how the group did, and did not, influence the final versions of our poems. The essays are in a book called Poem, Revised.

Judy died two days ago. Her death was not a surprise. She had cancer, and had lived longer than anyone expected. Last year she wrote that she was sorry she wouldn't live to see the outcome of Hillary vs. Obama. Then she did, and her last visit to the oncologist was on Inauguration day. She watched Obama take his oath on a television in the radiology waiting room, along with other patients who had not thought they would live to see that historical day.

I find myself thinking of Judy and the poet's group, and what they mean to me. What we writers mean to each other, which is something more evident with time and distance, and yes, with the shock of death. I've been reading some of Judy's books. Black Eye, the memoir, and Facing Fear, her views on politics, cancer, and the arts. Her voice is so strong, so mature, and yet I can't help remembering when both she and I were young writers, just learning how to speak by means of a pen. How tenacious we were. How determined we were in our belief that writing would make a difference, and that we had to do it.

The poet's group is still meeting. Has been weekly since 1989. Until now, I was the only one of the four original members who was not in it. Now there are two. Alison and Robin are still there, with a handful of others. The group will go on meeting, but not at Judy's house. That is a very strange thought. Judy's death was expected, but like all deaths it came with sudden finality. It does seem a light has been turned off, a pen capped, a voice silenced in the world. It makes me want to write all the more, to keep my voice going and growing, for my own sake and in honor of Judy, who listened and kept listening to me, when all my writing could do was cough and stutter and whisper.