Amélie Ahammad-Geens was born on a harvest moon to my sister Francesca and Nazz. She is beautiful, alert and strong, and she blogs.

In Elizabeth Costello the novelCoetzee’s latest novel to come out in paperback here in Stockholm is currently on sale during the annual countrywide book sale/reading frenzy. Elizabeth Costello the novelist gives a series of lectures on topics that clearly interest J.M. Coetzee the author. Costello is not Coetzee’s mouthpiece, however; she gets a generous hearing, but we get hints that while she and Coetzee know the same things, her perspectives are that of another person — perhaps an older, waning person.

One of Costello’s lectures is a passionate defense of animal rightsThis part of the novel was originally published by Coetzee as the novella The Lives of Animals, delivered as a lecture at Princeton University in 1997. The Nation has a great review.. In the middle of her speech, just as her daughter-in-law whispers to her son that “she is rambling,” she begins a critique of Thomas Nagel’s famous essay, What is it like to be a bat? Nagel argued that even if we can imagine what it is like to behave like a bat, we cannot ever know what it is like to be a bat, because human mental states are just too different from those of bats — for starters, we can’t sense sonar.

Costello’s retort is twofold: First, she can make inroads into imagining her own death (so why not an animal’s life?):

‘For instants at a time’ his mother is saying, ‘I know what it is like to be a corpse. The knowledge repels me. It fills me with terror; I shy away from it, refuse to entertain it.
 

‘All of us have such moments, particularly as we grow older. The knowledge we have is not abstract — “All human beings are mortal, I am a human being, therefore I am mortal” — but embodied. For a moment we are that knowledge. We live the impossible: we live beyond our death, look back on it, yet look back as only a dead self can.

Second, novels work because “there are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination.” And if that is the case, “if I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster…”

Later, it struck me: Elizabeth Costello the novel is really an essay entitled “What is it like to be Elizabeth Costello?” Coetzee wants to know: To what extent is it possible to imagine what it is like to be her or someone like her? Not just behave like an elderly person, but be one?

It’s a question I never really asked myself when I was 18, but which I have pondered more often in recent years. Perhaps we can at then least answer the question “What is it like to be 35?”
Answer: You wonder what it is like to be 70. I’m sure in part it has to do with both surviving grandparents — my grandmothers — now being in their early 90s.

One grandmother is as sharp as ever, living unassisted, devouring crosswords and French novels when not cheating atrociously at Solitaire or ScrabbleWhy do the elderly cheat at games so much? Have they learned a lesson in life we haven’t yet? I’ll put down phoney words at Scrabble but that is allowed. Feeling for blanks, however, is beyond the pale.. Every so often, matter of factly, she mentions that she won’t be around for much longer. I’ve noticed myself (and others) hush her on such occasions, telling her she will likely outlive us all, or mock-chiding her for her morbidness. I think these episodes reveal more about us than about her, however. At her age, death is not something you can put off thinking about. It looms. It is we young ones who grow skittish when compelled to contemplate death. But I wonder if we are not doing my grandmother a disservice by denying her an opportunity to give voice to such thoughts. I wonder if it is something that the elderly talk about when we are not around.

My other grandmother lives in a dementia ward. She is frail, often confused, and tires quickly. It is as if she has a surfeit of memories to process, but only as if, because that’s not really what I suspect she is experiencing. In fact, I am not at all sure I am able to imagine what it is like to be her, in part because when I attempt the exercise I find myself using mental faculties that I suspect I need to imagine no longer having.

Contemplating her existence doesn’t provide any new intellectual insights. We know consciousness is not a binary notion, on or off, a matter of being awake to the world or dead, but a collective, a group effort prone to slow dissolution. Yet what is it like to feel your identity ebbing? Could someone not in her state write a convincing novel about a protagonist who is?

There seem to be several different challenges to overcome, then, when trying to think one’s way into the existence of an elderly person. I can think of three. Perhaps the easiest is to imagine being physically frail; after all, we’ve all broken a bone or been bedridden. Then there is the matter of acquiring the right perspective — from near the end of a life, from where you can count with your hands the number of summers left to you. And finally, in some cases, the challenge of imagining being on a trajectory into mental unbeing.

I will probably live to find out what my grandmothers are experiencing now. It will be too late to compare notes with them, though.

“Because envy is the color of Kungsholmen.”

— 60cl Absolut Vodka

— 20cl Rose’s Lime Cordial

— Top with Rekorderlig päroncider (sparkling alcoholic pear cider, may be hard to find outside Sweden) (but try anyway)

— Decorate with a kiwi slice

Build in a highball glass stacked with ice. Or, if you are in neder Kungsholmen, shake the vodka and lime cordial with fresh ice in a cocktail shaker, pour into the highball, then top with pear cider. Don’t forget the kiwi.

Notes: Päroncider is delicious, if a little sweet, and certainly underused when it comes to constructing cocktails. Adding Rose’s lime returns some of the tartness we expect from pears, and the combination can expertly mask copious quantities of vodka. This drink is delicious, and if stuck to all night produces very little by way of hangovers the next morning.

The Kungsholmare was invented last Friday; extensively product-tested to rapturous acclaim at a party shortly thereafter, and has just been submitted to drinkalizer. All ingredients can be found at the Kungsholmen coop or Systembolaget.

Rant. You have been warned. This post is a wholly optional read.Having just moved into my seventh apartment in the two-and-a-half years I’ve been in Stockholm, I have been witness to several different solutions to providing broadband to Stockholmers. Most of the apartments I’ve lived in have an ethernet jack built right into the wall, providing a seamless and quite blazing 10mbps, or even higher, much like in a modern office. In a few other cases, I’ve had the misfortune of needing to rely on broadband via cable provider UPC.

If I had a choice, I’d not be using them at all. But they are the sole cable provider in my building, and in the building I lived in until last week, and in fact in most of central Stockholm. This is a wonderfully incumbent position to be in; in fact, why not abuse it? And so they did last month, deciding to take away my beloved BBC [PDF] from the basic cable package. Want it back? Please pay more.

This product downgrade was met with apparent resignation by UPC customers, as if they perfectly understand that a monopoly position naturally engenders a diminuition of service. But it bugs me. Strike one.

I ordered internet access from UPC well in advance of moving into my new place, not wanting to suffer a gap in connectivity. But by the day I moved in, there was still no sign of the cable modem they had promised to send me. So I went to a shop and got one myself, plugged it in and had my broadband. For 6 hours. Then it went down. That was on Monday evening.

I called them right away. Unfortunately, although their service goes down at all hours, their phone support is only up during business hours. The first person I talked to, on Tuesday, told me to wait a day to see if it went back up all by itself. Strike two. The second person, on Wednesday, eventually convinced himself there was a problem with their service, and promised to send someone. “In the next five days.” WTF??

Had I been able to speak my mind, I would have told them to stuff the six month contract I had been forced to sign with them and that I would take my business elsewhere. But there is no elsewhere. DSL really doesn’t sate my broadband appetite anymoreUPC’s cheapest “broadband” is 128mbps for $23 a month. I’m paying $57 a month for 4mbps. .

Well, now it’s Saturday. They don’t work on weekends, not even for emergency repairs to their network, so it will be Monday at the earliest, if they solve the problem, before I am wired again. I don’t blog at work, so here is the reason why this site has not been fed the past week.

Instead, I have been relying on the quite excellent Il Café, a real Italian café in the heart of KungsholmenJust off the corner of Scheelegatan and Bergsgatan that also has an Airport installed on the wall, with free broadband to all comers. It’s a brilliant investment on their part — the extra business they generate from laptoppers in a single day should foot their monthly broadband bill. I’ve dropped by there twice a day this week to pick up my email — the barista probably thinks I’m stalking her.

An new occasional series on people, places or objects which have influenced me.(Or, confessions of a preteen philatelist)

During my first stint as a New Yorker, between 1976 and 1982, I collected stamps. Although my opinion on the merits of collecting anything has shifted since those years — from “presents for me = good” to the belief that an attachment to physical things Physical things other than my Apple Mac, of course. insulates against new experiences — I still think that the study of stamps can provide quirky comparative perspectives on geographical history. But the end of postal monopolies and the rise of email have, in my mind, added a closing bracket to the set of stamps that are culturally meaningful. Stamps have gone the way of coats of arms, seals and silent movies: Interesting as products of their age, but false witnesses to our own (unless you consider collecting authentic false witnesses a worthwile ironical pursuit.)

But email was far in the future when I started my stamp collecting career, described here from my perspective as a 10-year old: (Click to enlarge)

I think some of those sentences really were mine; the rest was likely redacted by well-meaning grownups eager to portray children as uncorrupted adults. But that was my story, and Viola Ilma did play a large part in it.

I have fragmented memories of Viola Ilma. She was a big gregarious older woman, at least to my skinny preteen self, and I remember her always with cigarette in hand, or else with one at hand. She lived alone in an apartment near the NY Collectors Club in Murray Hill, and on weekends my parents would drive me there. The weather was always overcast, somehow. Most often, the two of us would sit at the kitchen table, with the rain titter-tattering against a window made up of small square panes. The apartment would be quiet and dark. Perhaps she had a cat. Her tea mugs, like her fingers, were stained yellowish brown.

Viola Ilma, my sister Francesca, and me. Dad took the picture.

There would always be a new shipment of stamps to examine, or else there was work to do on my presentation on stamps depicting the work of the World Health Organization, which I would eventually exhibit at several philately shows. I had figured out early on that Viola was some kind of philatelic evangelist, and well known among “pro” stamp collectors. But there was also an international connection that I could not quite fathom. I vividly remember a picture of Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia, hanging on a wall. I was under the impression she was related to him, for some reason. In one of her thousands of books a letter from Einstein acted as a bookmark, which impressed me greatly. I remember hoping with a children’s logic that she would give it to me one day — probably because she was generous, which to a child soon creates expectations.

When my family left New York in 1982, I lost touch with her. My interest in stamps waned, and I now wanted a Commodore 64, though I never lost the perspectives I gained in her kitchen. I suspect Viola saw stamp collecting as a means to an overarching internationalist end; googling her provides tantalizing hints of a remarkable life in that vein. Some annotated results follow:

/A picture of Viola Ilma taken in 1933 by the photographer Arnold Genthe and now in the collections of the Library of Congress.

/Viola wrote the Funk and Wagnalls Guide to the World of Stamp Collecting: The Joys of Stamp Collecting for the Beginning and Advanced Philatelist, published in 1978, right around the time I knew her.

/A letter from Eleanor Roosevelt to a soldier, dated 1942, that mentions Viola Ilma. I reproduce the letter here as the site is selling it:

The page further explains:

Another such letter. Viola Ilma’s name also crops up in Eleanor Roosevelt’s papers.During World War II, FBI Director dubbed First Lady ELEANOR ROOSEVELT “Rover” because she traveled so much. She visited U.S. military bases to help raise the morale of the men. Mrs. Roosevelt visited the battlefront (in a Red Cross uniform), ate with the soldiers in their mess halls and spent countless hours in hospital wards. Upon her return back to the White House, she would call families of soldiers she had met or write to them. VIOLA ILMA was Executive Director of the Young Men’s Vocational Foundation.

/Viola wrote And now youth!, published in 1934 and edited by Robert O. Ballou, who was also John Steinbeck’s editor at the time. The page selling the book notes:

The American Youth Congress was “arguably the most significant mobilization of youth-based political activity in American history prior to the late 1960s,” according to this National Park site.The founder of the American Youth Congress analyzes youth problems in the depression, urging youth to support Roosevelt’s New Deal as an alternative to traditional capitalist democracy, communism, and fascism. She also urges youth to fight against war, though she opposes isolationism and favors collective action. Noting that Nazism, fascism, and communism gained their strength in Europe from youth, she calls for mobilization of American youth and opposition to totalitarianism. (The author withdrew from AYC when a coalition of communists and socialists won control.)

/At this point, it is still possible to entertain doubts that these Viola Ilmas really are all the same person — it’s an original name, but that’s no guarantee with Google. Then I found this blurb about a book called The Political Virgin. It turns out that this extraordinary woman wrote an autobiography:

I am going to have to buy that book, clearly. (Anne Morgan was most likely the philantropist daughter of JP Morgan.)Viola Ilma is remembered as the brashest, most imaginative, and most unpredictable youngster of the nervous thirties. Her autobiography presents the story of a girl with an insatiable appetite for life and an enormous interest and faith in people. Ilma, granddaughter of a noted Swiss missionary in Ethiopia, startled 1930s Depression Era America with a new magazine called MODERN YOUTH, organized the first American Youth Congress & was a close friend of Anne Morgan & Eleanor Roosevelt.

The Ethiopia link removes any doubt in my mind that these Violas are the person I knew.

/There is another connection between her and Ethiopia. It seems she wrote on Ethiopia’s political and economic situation in 1959-60 for CD Jackson, Speechwriter and Special Assistant to President Eisenhower.

/Finally, with a resume like that, what are the odds, you think, that she would not also be this Viola Ilma, cast member of Broadway play, Cloudy with Showers, performed in 1931?

With the hindsight provided by Google, Viola’s willingness to spend hours and hours teaching some random kid now seems entirely in character. I still don’t know when she was born, and when (or even if) she died, but I have contacted other people who knew her, and there are a few more leads to explore, so I will report back when I know more.

Welcome, Oliver Strassel Rose.

But the new look is almost ready. Come back later today (Monday). If you could do me a favor in the meantime and take your copy of Internet Explorer out the back and shoot it in the head, that would be much appreciated. Don’t care if you make it beg first. If you’re not already surfing with Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, Camino, anything else, you better have a good excuse.

And whoever specced out Cascading Style Sheets 2.1 is also on my shitlist.

Since I will spend the remainder of the week trying to finish work projects on glögg hangovers before heading off to Ireland for the holidays, my blog will probably be quiet for a whileAny Irish bloggers near Dublin up for a pint? Email me.. Don’t expect anything new until after the new year. Unless it’s urgent, of course.

But there is plenty of old stuff for you to read in the meantime. I’ve collected my favorite posts from 2004 below. And seeing how blog awards are all the rage nowadays, I thought I’d take the opportunity to award myself some in the process. It’s certainly a lot easier than having to go around nominating oneself anonymously and then voting all day.

Best series: Top 10 things I hate about Stockholm.
Ten: Predatory seating
Nine: Culinary relativism
Eight: Preëmptive planning
Seven: Premature mastication
Six: Irrational discalceation
Five: Radiotjänst i Kiruna AB
Four: Temporal engineering
Three: Tunnelbana vision
Two: Simölacra

Best sociology post: It takes two to sambo
How Swedes mate.

Best physics post: Time is discrete
In more ways than one. (Two, in fact.)

Best local post: SoFo
When good memes go bad.

Best blogging post: For better blogging…
How to torture comment spam with a simple Turing test.

Best Swedish politics post: Swedish Cleavage!
Nationalism vs. internationalism is Sweden’s new wedge issue, replacing left vs. right.

Best Belgian politics post: Vlaams Belang: Not in the Flemish interest

Best polemic: Insult isn’t injury followed by Åke Green redux
Why hate speech should be protected.

Best philosophy post: Three questions for the conventionally religious

Best mathematics post: The de Bruijn Code
Unlocking the secrets of the portkod.

Viewers’ choice award for the most popular post: Cold Comfort
Top 10 reasons why Osama Bin Laden didn’t attack Sweden.

Worst post: Marshall in The New Yorker
Oh, never mind.

Now, if you were to list your own blog’s favorite posts for the year, I’d certainly be interested in revisiting them.

I really need to get a sideblog. In its absence, a quick list of interesting blogs and links I accumulated these past few days.

In Ireland, they have bridges dedicated to highly obscure mathematical concepts. No wonder they have the world’s highest quality of life (according to the Economist Intelligence Unit). #1 Ireland, #2 Switzerland, #3 Norway, #4 Luxembourg, #5 Sweden, #6 Australia, #7 Iceland, #8 Italy, #9 Denmark, #10 Spain. I must say I’ve led a quality life: Born in #2; lived in #2, #5, #6, #8 and #10, with parents currently in #1.

Lindsay Beyerstein’s blog Majikthise is a great jumpsite for philosophizing blogs, but also home to fine topical argumentation.

A blog with a mission. See if you can discern what it is.

Guy La Roche, a Dutchman blogging from France, keeps tabs on immigration politics in Belgium and the Netherlands.

And the only reason I’m not posting on events in the Ukraine is to help raise the average quality of what’s available online. I believe in the division of labor, and I yield to that Fistful of Euros, who are on fire right now. Ukraine in the EU by 2010, I say.