Taken outside my front door in Stockholm. Fortunately, my bicycle was stolen back in october, so it’s not mine.
Note to future self: Do not park bicycle underneath leaky gutter.
Icycle
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Category Archives: Personal
An ode to pears
I had a pear today at work.
Every Monday, a fruit basket arrives on our floor. The bananas always go first, followed by the grapes, apples and mandarins. By Thursday, only the pears and oranges are left. I can understand why oranges remain — their strength lies in their pressing — but pears?
Is it the complexion of their skin — always a bit mottled? Or is it their colors, an autumnal range, reminiscent of decay? Is it the shape, not round or pert but, well, pear-shaped — an adjective most often modified with “horribly” by the British? Apples look less like human anatomies past their sell-by date. Are pears apple’s ugly friend?
Apples often do boast bright young colors and taut puncture-me skin, but how much of this glamor comes through articifial enhancement? Pears, on the other hand, seem never to have benefited from science’s tonics. They have to rely on more subtle inducements.
When is the last time you bought pears at the supermarket? I have certainly gone a year or more without tasting one. But this morning, on an empty stomach, I trawled the bottom of that basket and bit into my first pear in a while.
Inside, the texture looks glassy, but the flesh is smooth and giving, pliant even, as if flattered by the unaccustomed attention. Pears are easy on the taste buds too, not as tart as apples, and wetter, though the juice is silky like soft water, and prone to run down the chin.
Does this make them harder to eat in polite company? Is this why they are shunned by the corporate snacking community? Do get reacquainted with a pear one of these days — they’re the mature fruit.
Radiotjänst guy
Well, they found me. The knock on the door came barely a month after having moved. I actually thought it was the landlord come to fix a light and so I bounded to the door, only to find an extremely sorry-looking man with droopy eyelids who began to inform me in resigned Swedish that maybe I was not paying for a TV license. I let him talk for a while, then feigned ignorance of Swedish and let him start again in English. He spoke rather excellent English, I must say. In fact, I suspect he was British. He reminded me of Hitler, but without the mustache or charisma.
My TV was turned off and around the corner, and so I could have lied to him, but he looked so sad and dishevelled and obviously much verbally abused and routinely lied to, and probably bullied in the playground growing up, that I just couldn’t bring myself to contribute further to his evident self-loathing. In fact, I had all the body language of a liar even when I admitted that yes, I have a TV the landlord lent me, and how much would it be, oh that much a month, and if I get rid of the TV do I just call… what is your service called, Radiotjänst? Emboldened by my less than hostile reception, Radiotjänst guy even made a brave attempt at explaining his purpose in life, pointing out that they guarantee the existence of public broadcasting free of advertising and political meddling.
What annoyed me most is that since I was pretending never to have heard about Radiotjänst, I couldn’t retort with evident knowledge that while there is nothing wrong with publicly funded broadcasting, there is everything wrong with poll tax collectors for televisionsA paradox… Here are three facts: 1) I have yet to meet a a Swede who approves of Radiotjänst. 2) Sweden is a democracy. 3) Radiotjänst continues to exist. How can these three things all exist simultaneously?.
Now that I think about it, I bet his look was a foil. Radiotjänst jobs are probably some of the most coveted ones around for actors, who see this as the ultimate test of their method-acting skills. Become Radiotjänst guy, the teacher intones to his charges as he sends them off to collect licenses. And whoever comes back with the fewest gets booted from the course. My guy is probably already back at central casting, where they are removing the make-up along with the artificial bags under his eyes. Soon, he’ll be at home sipping a claret as he learns his lines for an upcoming starring role in Death of a Salesman. No wonder he spoke such good English. I really think I have seen him on TV — now wouldn’t that be ironic?
Top ten things I hate about Stockholm, VIII
The eighth in an occasional series.
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
In New York, on the subway during rush hour, the locals have adopted highly evolved rules of behavior aimed at maximizing the efficiency of the transfer of passengers out of and then into the carriages at subway stops, with a view to getting the train rolling again ASAP. The process is one of constant sorting — between stops, new passengers and those not about to get off slowly trade places with those who are almost at their destination. Then, when the doors open, passengers about to get on the train leave a wide berth for those streaming off. They don’t get on until everybody who wants to get off does so.
The efficacy of these rules is self-evident. How they came about spontaneously is puzzling only until you’ve literally stood between a New Yorker and her way home in the evening. The elbow in your groin was not just a rude push aside; it was a public service announcement, whose content was: “During rush hour, getting out of each other’s way is not just a courtesy, it is the fastest way to your destination. Jerk.” It’s called militant utility maximization, and it is what makes New York so special.
In fact, this week I shall miss riding the New York subway, because those who do will be able to savor watching clumps of scared-looking Republicans from Topeka or Tampa as they learn this very lesson.
On the Stockholm tunnelbana, meanwhile, rush hour is still a Hobbesian state of nature. Getting on and getting off is attempted simultaneously. Some people who get on first will take one step past the door and plant themselves there, which is so convenient for them, so not for everyone else. In fact, there was one guy I saw on my ride home tonight (and if you guessed that he prompted this little tirade then you guessed right) whose thought process must have gone something like this:
It’s rush hour and I am standing right in front of the door through which I will eventually leave this train. That is quite clever of me. Oh look, we’ve arrived at a station that is not my destination and now my door opens. I shall just stand here, then. It seems that the young mother with the baby stroller behind me would like to get off, and the old lady with the walking aid would like to get on. I wonder how they are going to do this with me here. This could be quite difficult for them. Of course, I would never consider actually stepping out of the carriage for a moment, because this is not my destination — why would I get off the train if this is not where I get off the train?
Had I been the mother, that moron’s ankles would have been a lot bluer, but then I’m not quite up on the ethics of using baby strollers as weapons when there are babies in them. I myself practice the New York school of (dis)embarkment: A polite “ursäkta” (excuse me), a count to one-and-a-half, and then the full-on barge, taking assorted stragglers with me. And all so that they can get home faster tonight.
The kräftskiva
Somewhere towards the northern end of the Stockholm archipelago there is a red wooden house atop its own island, snug in a glade of pines and birches. There is smooth slanting rock to the east for morning sunning, same to the west for sunset viewing, a dock, an outhouse, a fire pit on a spur, a flagpole, and a sauna, all placed at polite distances from one another, connected by meandering paths through low brush. When I arrived there, I felt like I had landed into that immersive computer game Myst — onto an island built from an improbably aesthetic assortment of elemental shapes and textures. The rock faces are veined with pink, and the water they curl into sloshes with waves that are a little too fractal. The cotton-tufted sky is doused in polarized light that should not ever produce such blue hues in real life.
There are distinct soundscapes too. Sit to the west, towards the prevailing wind, and you notice the hissing of the reeds at the water’s edge, set against deeper notes of swaying pine trees. Higher up, a flagpole line beats a syncopated tang. The outhouse door operates with a squeak-thudA dunny for the D’ni, perhaps? Sorry, you have to be an Australian geek before that’s even remotely funny.. I half-expect to find a puzzle here, and indeed there is a strange round metallic contraption hidden amid a clump of trees, though I rather suspect divining its mysterious purpose would involve getting to know the outhouse composting system rather intimately.
It is on this island that Helena G. and two dozen of her friends celebrated her birthday last weekend, at a party that managed to sublimate all that is essential about the Stockholm weekend getaway. We trickled in via ferry and car, and then rowed the final stretch. Once there, I dumped my bags and quickly made for the water. The island had to be swum around; a marking of the territory, perhaps. Then, we sunned for hours, stuck like fridge magnets to the sloping rock, holding our towels in place.
As I lay there, A conversation I was half-monitoring veered past a word I couldn’t contextualize. Mambo? It’s a neologism derived from sambo (to live (bo) together (samman) as a couple but not be married) but it means to live with one’s mother. Were there any more such words? Certainly, I was told, as Swedes are nothing if not socially innovative. For example, there is kombo, which means to live together with a friend (kompis); ensambo, to live unattached alone (ensam); and särbo, which can mean to be attached but to live apart, for example when a relationship that begat children is undergoing a downgrade — and which upon first hearing I first thought was written serbo, i.e. to live with a Serb. There would have to be a pambo, then, too (to live with one’s father)? Yes, everyone conceded, though without much enthusiasm, as they turned back towards the sun. I decided I could take a liking to punning like this in Swedish: Bilbo, to live in one’s car (bil)? Lesbo, obviously? Hobo, without fixed abode? People were finding spots further afield. Limbo, when moving from one apartment to another? Bimbo, when you’re living on the set of Big Brother? OK, I’ll stop. Wait, no, yobbo, to live with a hooligan?
Much later, it was time to drag considerable amounts of booze to the spur, where the tables were being set for the kräftskiva, or crayfish party. Silly hats were donned, the aquavit glasses were filled to the brim but never for long, and drinking songs sounded out across the water towards the setting sun. The center of attention, however, was the crayfish themselves, hundreds of whom were sacrificed in an orgy of focused determination that lasted hours, until the fingers bledIf Ridley Scott’s aliens ever made a sci-fi horror film, I imagine it would involve hordes of giant Swedes with heinous headgear methodically ripping apart crustacean carapaces before bringing these mangled bodies to their mouths to suck out the flesh.. These things must have negative net calories, considering the effort it takes to eat them, and how the hunger for them never slakes.
A vignette from later still: Realizing that the sauna experience is just like jogging but while sitting still, and that it is thus a far faster and more civilized form of achieving the same inevitable result — total body meltdown. Furthermore, a dunking in a dark Baltic is a far more effective resuscitation tactic than a cold shower could ever be back in Stockholm.
The next morning, it was time to swim around the island again, followed by coffee and a day of lazing before taking a slow boat full of good food back to Stockholm. Weekends in the archipelago truly rank among the world’s best.
Charles and Pamela get married
Fellow SAISer, ex-housemate and blogger Charles Kenny got married to Pamela Street over the weekend at Balliol College, Oxford, on an splendid day. I took it upon myself to document the proceedings. Email me if you want a hi-res version of any of these.
Perfect Day 2 (July 23, 2004)
Perfect Day 1 was May 5, 2002.If somebody were to ask me to describe a perfect summer vacation day, it might go something like this: It would be sunny in Ireland, where I’d be, and I would spend the morning in the garden making progress listening to Henning Mankell’s Innan Frosten, in Swedish, on the iPod, while following along in the book, much as I promised Erik I would.
After lunch, I might take the bus into Dublin to pick up my copy of Prime Obsession, which would have been ordered at Hodges Figgis the week before. Then, I’d wade through swarms of Spanish English-language students just released from the day’s classes — all practicing their immaculate Spanish on each other — and make my way to the Irish Film Institute, which would be starting a Richard Linklater retrospective that day with a showing of Before Sunset, the sequel to Before Sunrise, a movie I saw twice in so many days in 1995 — once secretly, in order to avoid the barbs of so-called friends that I was showing the symptoms of terminal hopeless romanticism.
Before Sunset is 80 minutes of real-time conversation between Jesse and Celine as they meet in Paris, not so accidentally, nine years after a first encounter in Vienna in Before Sunrise. A Linklater retrospective would show both films, of course, but I’d resist the tempation to see them chronologically, preferring instead to try to resurrect memories from 1995, much as the protagonists do in Before Sunset. And the movie would stir the heart: perversely, in the intervening years, Celine has gotten herself an MA in international relations, while Jesse has become a novelist — where I am & where I’d like to be. And they’ve both lived in New York. No wonder their duet is even more compelling to me the second time round, if that’s possible.
After dinner, there’d be a public lecture by Roger Penrose — around the corner and down the street — capping a week-long international conference on quantum gravity. Penrose would title his talk Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in Modern Physical Theories, and he would illustrate it with transparencies of mermaids.
Penrose would point out that the famous (hypothetical) Shrödinger’s cat experiment still leads to a paradox in quantum mechanics: Whenever the cat is both alive and dead, the result of a superposition of possible states for a particle that decides the fate of the cat, there can also be an observer that is both happy and sad, until we observe him (or her). But we, in turn, might also both happy and sad, simultaneously, until observed by an outsider. The boundary for the macroscopic effects of quantum behavior seems to be arbitrary, in other words — or, at least, not well defined. This would be problematic, and hence quantum mechanics, while immensely useful, still requires a measure of faith. Penrose goes on to show a transparency describing an experiment, being built, that should probe this boundary.
And then I’d blog it. And that is exactly how I spent July 23, 2004.
Top ten things I hate about Stockholm, VII
The seventh in an occasional series.
Ten: Predatory seating
Nine: Culinary relativism
Eight: Preëmptive planning
Seven: Premature mastication
Six: Irrational discalceation
Five: Radiotjänst i Kiruna ABFour: Temporal engineering
It’s the longest day of the year, I’ve got front-row seats at Mosebacke terrace for a glorious slo-mo sunset that’s been turning Stockholm orange for hours, hot air balloons are wafting past a crescent moon, and I have the audacity to write about something I hate here.
Well, I have to. I’m writing a series about things I hate, not love, about Stockholm. To be honest, I was running out of subject matter, but that was before it was brought to my attention just last week that Midsommar — the summer solstice and Sweden’s most treasured day — is not on June 21 this year, but instead has been decreed to occur on June 26, because, well, it makes for a more convenient three-day holiday.
This is quite shocking. Latter-day druids everywhere are dancing around menhirs at this very moment; huge man-made structures in Latin America are perfectly aligned with the sun at great cost to previous generations; people in the Antarctic are suffering right now for this cause; and it is the one day that keeps Swedes going between November and March — but if nature has the gall to have the longest day happen on a day other than Saturday, Swedes reschedule it like it’s a dentist appointment.
How is this different from celebrating Christmas on December 27 — because the presents are cheaper? Cinco de Mayo on nuevo de Mayo? New Year’s on January 3? Would you mind? I thought so.
Last year, my first Midsommar did fall on a Saturday, so I was not then apprised of this cavalier attitude Swedes have towards the natural rhythms of nature. But I should have known better: Over the past 18 months, I’ve repeatedly butted against another example of this predilection for ruthless temporal engineering: The week-based calendar.
In my first Stockholm apartment, the hallway was swept by tenants according to a rotation posted on the communal bulletin board: Next to my name, it said “V.40-48-3-11…” Swedish readers already know what this means, but I had to ask a neighbor, who told me that it was my turn to clean on the 40th week of the year, on the 48th, och så vidare. And when might that be? “Look it up.”
Instead I guessed, and clearly wrongly, as everytime I thought it was my turn somebody else cleaned ahead of me that week. Nobody said anything, though. Maybe they were embarrassed about their calendar, and with good reason, as I have just had to delve into its fiendish machinations for the sake of this post. It is emphatically Napoleonic in its arbitrary rigidity: You’d think week 1 is always the week the new year starts on. You’d think wrong — In 2004, week 1 starts on Dec 29, 2003; in 2005, week 1 starts Jan 3, 2005. 2004 has 53 weeks, 2005 52. I’m surprised anyone cleans at all.
At a work-related meeting last week, I was asked if I would be in Stockholm during the 33rd week. “What, do I look pregnant to you?” is the retort I stopped myself from using, instead asking for a translation into western dates.
Maybe the adoption of the week as a calendaring tool was the gateway to all this insouciance regarding Midsommar: After all, it’s not as if the holiday is being moved out of week 26, so what’s the fuss?
The letter, part 4: Meeting Margaretha
If you haven’t yet read parts one through three, you can read all four parts chronologically here. In fact, it’s a good refresher for everyone, as the first post dates back to almost a year ago.
I’ve been meaning to deliver the letter to Margaretha, but for a variety of reasons the opportunity did not present itself until earlier this week, when she and her daughter and I agreed to meet at Tranan after workI was early so I spent half an hour in Stockholm’s public library and its remarkable reading room, designed by the renowned Swedish modernist Erik Gunnar Asplund..
I sat myself at a table, ordered a glass of wine and waited, somewhat nervously, with the letter in my bag. I was on the lookout for a woman in her early fifties accompanied by her daughter. Margaretha arrived alone, however, and as neither of us knew each other, there was some hesitation before we ventured to introduce ourselves.
Within minutes, it was clear we were going to get along wonderfully (in Swedish). She is engaging and witty, and I realized I lucked out with my letter delivery. Monika, her journalist daughter, soon joined us. They share the same gestures and flash the same smile. It’s obvious they are close.
I produce the letter. Margaretha produces photo albums from 1970. She’s even managed to unearth a photograph of the letter’s author, Bengt M—, courtesy of a move in the last few months
. Here he is doing his military service, from the exact period they were going out. From her photo album, here is a picture of Margaretha doing her studenten, a high school graduation ritual, a month or two before the letter in question was written:
And then, over the course of an hour or so, she fills in the details. When Margaretha graduated, she was was going out with Bengt, who was doing his military service. That summer, she moved to Stockholm to study while working at the central bank. For a few months she stayed at student housing at the address to which Bengt addressed the letter.
Within weeks of arriving in Stockholm, however, she had met and was dating Rolf, who also worked at the bank. Bengt was not aware of this when he wrote the letter, in which he mentions visiting her in Stockholm in the coming days. He did visit, and she broke up with him then. Margaretha winces a little when telling this part. Apparently, Bengt asked her why she couldn’t just have phoned him the bad news, thus saving him the trip. A debate ensues with her daughter about what the etiquette is for breaking up in such circumstances. Bengt didn’t get angry, however, just disappointed, Margaretha says. He was gentle and kind.
She met Bengt one more time, during the Christmas holidays later in 1970, when things were still a bit awkward, and they lost touch after that. The group of friends they had in common also drifted apart over the years, though most of them still live in the same area in southern Sweden.
Margaretha married Rolf, the man she broke up with Bengt for; they’ve had two children and lived in Luxembourg and Gothenburg before settling in Stockholm. It turns out that when I called, the children were under the impression their dad was her first love. But how many of us know the details of our parents’ pre-marital love lives? I certainly don’t, and it will stay that way unless somebody calls me with news of a long-lost love letter addressed to my mother from somebody patently not my father.
After I called and Margaretha saw the letter online, she looked for Bengt M— online, found him living in the area where they grew up and called him. He remembered her without prompting. In brief: He is a construction engineer and recently divorced. This summer, Monika is travelling to southern Sweden, and she says she will try to meet up with Bengt, so he can tell his side of the story. When she reports back, you’ll read about it here.
Then, it was time for photo ops:
Note the lovely Swedish summer weather.
As to what this letter was doing on a ledge on St. Marks Place — that mystery remainsMargaretha and Monika, if parts of your story got lost in translation, need clarification or if you want to add anything, please go right ahead.. I don’t think we’ll ever uncover its trajectory, from student housing in Stockholm in 1970 to the sidewalks of New York in 1999.
Summers on the Jersey Shore
This is an exception to the two-week no posting promise. I promise.In this week’s Prairie Home Companion [RealAudio], a truly standout edition, including:
@ 01:25:30: A tribute by Garrison Keillor to Ray Charles: A wonderful monologue followed by a lovely rendition of “Hallelujah I Love Her So”.
@ 01:34:54: One of the best “The News from Lake Wobegon”s in years — a bittersweet remembrance of drinking and smoking days long gone that meanders towards a country song about Richard Nixon and ends with strident political commentary on current affairs. Hilarious and yet quite moving.
The whole show is worth listening to. It was recorded in Ocean Grove, an old Methodist settlement on the Jersey Shore that I once managed to visit with Anna and her Betty, a white 1984 Cadillac Coupe Deville that was then disintegrating gracefullyLater that summer, Anna and Anna manged to drive her all the way to Texas before she perished completely.. We were on a pilgrimage of sorts to Asbury Park, just up the shore, where Bruce Springsteen first played gigs at the now legendary Stone Pony, right by the ocean at the end of a dilapidated parking lot. Anna had spent many a teenaged Swedish winter locked in her closet listening to Bruce, so this trip had a very special meaning to her.
In Asbury Park, we learned that Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes, old pals of Bruce, were playing at the Stone Pony that evening, so we went and listened for a while, but it was getting late and so we left before the end of the show. The next day, the papers screamed how Bruce Springsteen had joined Johnny onstage in a surprise ending, only the second time in 25 years Bruce had played at the Stone Pony. Anna was sick to her stomach. It ruined her summer. She has not listened to Bruce Springsteen since.