jill/txt

[scared]

I signed up for an excursion the Alliance Française is hosting this Saturday. It’s a guided tour of the roses out at the Arboretum - in French of course - and to be followed by a picnic. The website seems welcoming and the point does seem to be to provide an environment for people who aren’t French to speak French in, but I’m terrified. I mean, sure, I can speak French, I spoke nothing but French for two weeks earlier this month, I was happy. I can read Le Monde and even understand most announcements at train stations, but I make so many mistakes, and I can never remember le subjonctif, and they’ll all laugh at me and they’ll be annoyed that I came because my French is so far from perfect and I don’t know anyone there and I suppose if it’s terrible I can just sort of be quiet and go home early.

And if I don’t go I will regret it forever and my French won’t get any better. I’m going.

[lonely]

I’m home and it’s dark and loneliness is seeping in. My daughter’s going on holidays with her dad and my sweetheart’s on a plane and won’t be here for weeks. My neighbour died last night, cracking jokes, her sister told me, and minutes after she died her family watched fireworks from her hospital window, can you imagine, fireworks were being fired off from the top of the mountain she saw every day for years and walked on every day as a younger woman. She lived in this house for decades, treading the floor above my ceiling, and this unfamiliar emptiness mingles with the loneliness I’d feel anyhow at the end of weeks of travelling and talking and playing and loving and parenting. Tomorrow I’ll ring my friends and hope they remember me after all my travelling and absence. Tomorrow I’ll work. This weekend I’ll visit my sister.

Right now I think I’ll crawl under my doona and turn the TV on for company.

[dawn]

It’s dawn. I guess that’s a gentle suggestion that perhaps, given I’m on this continent and not on that, I might consider sleep.

[sizes]

Confused by different standards I bought jeans in the States two sizes below what I thought my size was and returned home to find the jeans are big enough I could be five months pregnant and perfectly comfortable in them. What a waste of money.

I wonder how all these different size conventions around the world actually originated. 38 or M in Northern Europe, 75B in Scandinavia, 95B in France, 10 in Australia, something less than 8 in the US, XXL in Asia. Did everyone just start their own systems completely independently? Then why do the sizes always skip two - from 10 to 12, from 38 to 40?

Maybe I’ll try and boil the jeans. Aren’t jeans supposed to shrink, anyway?

[hansaspill]

We not only had fun following the players around and laughing at their antics, they reminded us, in the most amusing manner, of how rich with history Bergen is. It’s easy to forget all the stories here - like the stories of the Hanseatic League, whose Northernmost post was in Bergen. The Hansa merchants’ houses still line the harbour, and stepping into the labyrinthine passages between them is still bewitching. Of course, 500 years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to walk through those passages. Women weren’t permitted in the area at all. Nor could women own property, sign contracts or trade - except for their bodies. I like living now. It was great seeing my seven-year-old daughter soak up the history, too, especially with such enjoyment.

Bergen Byspill will be playing Hansaspill for another month.

[prime numbers]

Will Self’s imitation of Dorian Gray got a bit repetitive for me so I started on a murder mystery Mum lent me that’s written from the perspective of a boy with Asperger’s. It ’s so satisfying to sometimes read a book where you can race through 40 pages in half an hour. I think perhaps having a degree in literature adds a touch of guilt to the pleasure of voracious reading, you know, if it were Great Literature, you couldn’t read it that fast, and knowing how much Great Literature there is, shouldn’t the lit. grad. spend all her time reading Great Literature? Not to mention Great Electronic Literature. Instead I curl up with an airport paperback, the guilt, along with nostalgia for childhood reading abandon, sweetening the pleasure of the text. There are some unexpected pleasures in a story narrated like this, too. This, for instance, after a detailed (but not too detailed, you know, the narrator may not understand people but the author knows how much a reader can take) explanation of how simple it is to find prime numbers, except that it isn’t, not when the numbers get big.

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

Imagine if we knew the rules for life, for emotions, for people. Huge computers would spend years working out the immensely complicated details - it could be done, of course, with a powerful enough computer, just as you can work out whether a number with 100 digits is a prime number or not, it would just take time. I wonder whether immensely complicated emotions could be used for codes, as prime numbers are?

[aura]

What a wonderful explanation of what Benjamin means by the aura of a work.

[titles]

I was really disappointed when I realised that even after my PhD, neither Scandinavian Airlines or KLM would let me change my title from Ms to Dr Walker. However, British Airways would have been happy to oblige. I could have chosen Her Highness or President as my title with British Airways. I wonder whether people who choose titles like Crown Princess or Contessa are still allowed to fly economy? (via Boing Boing)

[blogging homelessness gets press and home]

So a student at NYU slept in the always-open library because his $15,000 scholarship and his part-time jobs couldn’t cover the $10,000 a year dormitory costs as well as books and food. And he blogged it: just look at the cover page of his blog, he’s revelling in his story and boy has he found a hook for his blog! The library threw him out after the press got the story (here the NY Times story, subscription-free in a syndicated newspaper) but NYU have put him up in dorms for free for the rest of the semester. As you would, given the press.

Free tuition, student loans for everyone that actually more or less cover living expenses and practically no homelessness ROCKS! I *heart* Norway.

[where I’ve been]

This definitely belongs to the “I Choose And Personalise My Self-Representations Therefore I Am” category. Can anyone translate that to Latin for me so it sounds more philosophical, please?

Yesterday Scott suggested I’d have done well as one of those colonial ladies a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago who travelled the world in white hats and long skirts, drank gin and tonics in Arabia, India and Kuala Lumpur (I’ve done the latter) and wrote elegant books about their adventures. I’m surprised the idea never occurred to me, actually, because wow, that sounds like a wonderful life.

I want to go to California. And Cuba. And Moscow. And back to Uluru and Tokyo and Rome.

[bees]

I live in a housing corporation, a borettslag, with about a hundred households and a board and a caretaker and concerned neighbours who once I got past thinking them busybodies turn out to be caring, helpful and supportive. The general assembly’s next week and today the petitions arrived. One is from a family down the road who last summer tried their hands at bee-keeping. I’m several houses away and merely noted this with amusement, but their closest neighbours complained, pointing out that the rules only allow cats and dogs, and so the bees had to be sent out to the country somewhere. The petition is masterful. They suggest extending the permitted pets to include “small animals” that are kept in cages indoors or outdoors, such as hamsters, guinea pigs, birds, oh, and bees. Pets are good for children, they argued. Fewer allergies. More love. Bees.

[might actually redesign…]

I, uh, ended up photoshopping away at that mockup last night instead of grading papers or finishing the essay that’s due today. I think I quite like it. I especially like the very formal “Dr Jill Walker, Dept of Humanistic Informatics” etc along the top and the nice pink boxes with just my latest publication or talk featured, with links explaining what the rest’ll be. When I haven’t given a talk for a while I could just remove the talks box, too. If I wanted.

What’s NOT in there yet is recent comments and trackbacks, which I do want to keep prominent - a blog is never a blog unto itself, it’s part of a network and I want to show that. But where can I put them? Up to the right and the publications and so on will be pushed down below “the fold” (the part of the page that’s visible before you scroll).

I also need to figure out how to show archives by date and category. I think I’ll put in another pink box which might have direct links to two or three of my favourite categories and then has a link to a page with a complete index to category and monthly archives.

And where to put the blogroll? Ghani has replaced the classic blogroll by picking out a random blog she reads for every time the page is loaded, with a “Ghani is probably reading /such and such a weblog/ right now". That’s cool, but I use my blogroll as kind of a startpage for surfing the web. I suppose I could put that on a separate page, too, but…
Any ideas?

[mud baths]

Something is broken. Posts don’t appear, then they multiply, then they won’t delete. I don’t have time to fix it: I’m going to a spa outside of Oslo in a few hours. No, not for massages and mud baths. I’m going to give a talk on new media art and literature. “Something like the article you wrote for Kunstkritikk.no last November“, they’ve requested. Sure!

They say there’s wireless, and the seaside. I’m hoping for steam baths too.

[family stories]

This evening I rediscovered a small stack of family papers, mostly relating to my grandmother Lorna’s family. Lorna Walker, née McAuley - I posted a scrap of video of Lorna a month or so ago. Each person on the family tree has notes scribbled against his or her name that suggest fascinating little stories. Lorna’s mother was Mary Maud Judge: “from New England area, went from Gira (?) to Inverell in a covered wagon as a child. Didn’t like Peter (brother-in-law)". Lorna’s father was Patrick Phillip, who had 9 siblings. His family was Catholic and didn’t like his marrying a protestant, especially Mary Maud, who was not good enough for him. His brother Peter was a violinist who died of drink, and this was used (by Mary Maud?) as a threat against my grandmother’s brother Jim when he became a poet. William, the eldest brother, cleared out as a teenager but turned up again as an adult, although the family always doubted that he was really who he claimed to be. Patrick’s mother was a “grim type” and her brother James Lalor was (more’s the pity) not the James Lalor of the Eureka Stokade.

The jewel of the family tree crown, though, is my great great great great aunt, Catherine Elizabeth McAuley, who became Mother Mary Catherine McAuley when she founded the Sisters of Mercy. My family notes (in Lorna’s hand I think) state that she started a refuge home for girls, and that the Archbishop insisted she must become a nun to run it. So she did. The were the first walking nuns, nuns who left their convents to visit and care for the poor, a kind of early social worker, according to the this history of her. Sisters of Mercy’s history of her. Thanks to the glory of Google I also know that her best friend and some other Sisters went to Chicago in 1846 and started a girls’ school which is still running, and is called McAuley. There are 10,000 Sisters of Mercy worldwide today. Isn’t that awesome! My great great great great auntie! In 1990 she was even declared venerable by the pope. “Venerable recognizes a person’s heroic virtue and sanctity.” If they decide she performed miracles, which I imagine would be stretching things a little, but if they did, she could become a saint.

I love finding stories.

[update: I think we’ll say that my ancestors claimed to be related to Catherine McAuley. Who knows. Perhaps my ancestors just grabbed the McAuley name and history as groovy accessories for a new life in Australia. See the comments for relentless detail.]

[le conditionnel]

Gazing at the lavender in my garden (slowly refinding growth) I decided I’ll go back to Provence this summer, to the wonderful monastery I was at last July, to the delicious food and wine and sun and red-brown earth and laughing people. I dug out my notes and started practicing le conditionnel: “Si j’etais un homme / Je t’offrirais de beaux bijoux / Une fleur pour ton appartement / Des parfums à vous rendre fous / Et juste à côté de Milan / dans une villa qu’on appelle Bergame / Je te ferais construire une ville. / Je suis femme et quand / On est femme on n’achète pas ces choses-là.” A girlfriend of mine once sent roses to her boyfriend when he was at work. He was mortified, utterly embarrassed. She cried as she told me.

[need]

You know how sometimes you want to just write write write meld emotions to words and let everyone know yet you’re not quite sure what they must know what you need to say only that you know that you need to say it and the music crescendos till you know you should have been a musician songwriter composer but no you need to write it but what what what what what what

[what horrible affliction are you?]

Oh dear. I was hoping for something more, well, horrific, really. This just isn’t very frightening, is it?

Take the Affliction Test Today!
A Rum and Monkey disease.

[ditching everything but the computer]

I regularly concoct new plans for arranging the living spaces of my flat to allow for the varying numbers of adults and children it accomodates at various times. (Goodness. That sounds more bohemian than it actually is.) Today’s plan, which, you never know, might even be acted upon, not only involves switching the room functions around completely, but also requires chucking my TV, DVD player and my excuse for a stereo and replacing them all with a nice 20″ imac. With a bit of hacking it even appears I could probably set up a mac like a TiVo, so it’d record television broadcasts and let me record them, pause live broadcasts, all that. Even outside of the US. All this thanks to the open source project XMLTV. They don’t have Norwegian listings yet, though they have Danish ones, but someone’ll want to do this, soon, even in Norway.

That’d save space. And be so much cooler.

[write!]

Half an hour’s writing a day keeps the doctor away, Finn notes. Let’s blog!

[inscription]

My friend ordered an iPod online and said yes when the computer asked him if he’d like an inscription on his iPod. He typed in “This pod belongs to…” in Norwegian, of course, and of course, that involves the letter ø. Which came out as a question mark in the inscription. Denne pod’en tilh?rer… Professional, no?

Yes, I desperately want an iPod. That’s why I keep writing about them. I’ll not bother with the inscription, though.

[love explained]

Love and lust are, like hunger and thirst, hormone-induced states that our brains reward us for lest we forget to have sex, eat and drink. Love, feeling madly in love, is different from hunger or fear, though:

Prairie voles - and presumably humans - have a lot of variation in their vasopressin receptors though. That’s why some love more constantly than others.

Oh, you might be able to supress love using drugs like Prozac, because crazy-in-love-with-you is characterised by low levels of serotonin, but, the experts say, you’d only stand a chance of fighting love in its early stages, or perhaps when healing after a bad breakup. Love is a more powerful drive than hunger.

Soon we’ll have DNA tests along with the prenup.

[cheer!]

A long morning of wild yet possible and incredibly inspiring ideas sent those grumps away! Brilliant!

[needing orange]

I woke up grumpy. I cheered a little at my joyful child jumping on me but the relentless before-school routine of shower, coffee, breakfast, lunch packs, nagging, get dressed, come and eat, brush your teeth, hair, put on shoes gnawed that away away. Child safely at school I look at the calendar. It’s all red and blue: blue for work, red for parenting. There’s no orange for Jill, none at all, not between last Friday night and this Friday night.

The problem with loving your work is that it’s easy to work all the time. Just check this, fix that, write a bit of this, finish up that, write another email, read this book, it’s useful for work, you know. The problem with parenting alone, even if it’s only every other week, even if you have supportive grandparents for your child, is that you’ve always got to be sensible, adult. Enforce bedtime, get your child to school in time, help organise friendships, monitor homework, ensure warm enough clothes, administer cough syrup in the middle of the night. Oh, there’s silly bits too, heaps of fun bits, good bits, love, she dashes back to kiss me before running through the school gate, but oh I need orange time. Time for Jill.

[no method]

Via Andrew, I found a wonderful article arguing that in the humanities, “method” is mere rhetoric forced upon us by social scientists. Method is not how the humanities work. Asking a humanities scholar to explain his or her method is like asking somebody whether they’ve stopped beating their spouse. (Is this question famous in English, too? “Har De sluttet å slå Deres kone?") It’s a question that sets premises that make any answer wrong - unless you refuse to answer, and instead change the terms.

Studying literature I’d never have thought of this at all. Method was irrelevant, something social scientists did. We read and thought and compared and combined theories with texts. But when I applied for a PhD the research council asked for more details about my “method". Now I’m supervising Masters students here at Humanistic Informatics who all have to do a “method” course. As I’ve understood it, this method is mostly if not completely comprised of methodology from the social sciences: interview technique and analysis, statistical analysis, correspondence analysis, these sorts of thing. Great for doing surveys, irrelevant for close readings or considerations of the nature of net.art or pervasive gaming. But every grad student I’m supervising comes to me and asks me anxiously about method.

Andrew may have saved me. An article, by Arild Fetveit, controversial, says Andrew. If it’s controversial, so am I: “The Trojan horse: how the concept of “method” serves to marginalise humanities perspectives within media studies.” Only the abstract, and this translated title, are in English. Here’s the abstract:

(more…)

[need quiet]

I am so ready for the holidays.

[stress]

After fifty years of stress research, almost exclusively on men, the standard doctrine has been that when under pressure, humans snap to fight or flight reactions. We hide away or we get angry, is the idea. Recently it occurred to stress researchers at UCLA that perhaps there’s a reason why women all do that cake-baking house-cleaning thing when deadlines loom near. They actually looked at women, instead of using a sample with 90% men, and found that yes, the rise in oxytocin in women under pressure leads us to tend and befriend. Looking after our children, spending time with our girlfriends and cleaning our houses actually refreshes us, they reckon, making us more able to deal with whatever pressures had made us feel stressed.

I’m going to stop feeling guilty when I have that amazing urge to chat for an hour and tidy my office just before a deadline. (via Danah)

[intervention]

I love French. Perhaps in part because I don’t master it, not a bit, though I love reading and speaking it, creatively more than correctly, I fear. Some French words are wonderful. For instance, while in English, I rather boringly gave a talk at Brown a week ago, in French, it was an intervention. Doesn’t that sound wonderful?

[dr anders!]

Congratulations to Anders Fagerjord, who promises stories, pictures and poems from his PhD defence yesterday, just as soon as he’s not quite so tired anymore. Hooray! Anders’s PhD is on Rhetorical Convergence: Earlier Media Influence on Web Media Form and judging by his other writing it’s going to be pretty damn good.

[skirt-twirling]

Skirt-twirling - the way a skirt will rotate around your waist to right or left as you walk - is one of those annoyances I had never thought to discuss with anyone. Grumpygirl has though. She not only did an office survey to determine typical rotation directions but has begun measuring distance by how far her skirt twirls: “The walk from work to uni, for instance, takes aproximately three-quarters of a full rotation, whereas the walk from work to home takes a full two rotations.” Maybe I too will give up that constant self-correction: hitching stockings aligning skirt.

[awake]

Damn. I should have gone to bed while I was still tired. But no, now that I’ve finished preparing for tomorrow (and more) I’m wide awake. Bet ya I won’t be tomorrow.

[80% of grandtextauto]

I realised this evening, after Andrew had asked “so how’s Scott?” and “when’s Noah going to California?” and “did you get to see Nick?” that I’ve met 80% of Grandtextauto in the past week. I’m pretty happy with that. They’re all interesting, courteous and charming. I like their blog, too.

[dinner]

Mark blogged dinner last night - which was delicious as well as adventurous. I measured the snow against my leg today and it really is knee high.

[boston morning]

I’m in Boston. I forgot my power adapter so I have no camera or telephone. There’s thick lumpy slippery snow everywhere, far deeper than most winters in Bergen ever produce, and everything’s chaotic, but I’m pretty happy with all these great friends and colleagues I’ve been hooking up with in Providence and here, and of course, in Jersey.

[ms, dr or prof?]

So I thought I was over making people call me doctor, but when I rang to book a room at the Inn at Brown, the man said “Which salutation shall I put? Ms, Doctor or Professor?” Hard not to grin at that, and at the answer I could give him!

[what am i?]

“Mummy, am I Norwegian or English?” My daughter is seven, and earlier that day a couple of the older girls at school had asked her the question she now asked me. She couldn’t answer the girls at school. It sure is confusing to be a multicultural seven year old, when other people ask you to identify yourself as singular.

Imagine a world where you didn’t have to define what you were.

There was a conversation at Elouise’s a few days back about this kind of stuff.

[worship]

Oh, what a gorgeous librarian!

[now]

I have an amazing capacity for foreseeing possible futures and planning how I would respond to any number of unlikely catastrophic outcomes. Sometimes I can catch myself in flight, bring me back to myself and be here. Now. Me. Taking photos of small things and writing a sentence or two about them is one of the ways I do this - I find that those five or ten minutes of writing to an image soothe me more than many cups of tea or wine, and that bringing my camera everywhere lets me see the world in far more detail. Elouise describes the same thing from another angle.

I’m tired of living towards the future, but it’s so hard to stay now!

[temporary repatriation]

Australian researchers working outside of Australia can apply for grants to spend three months at the University of Sydney - you can download a word document of the announcement from the Southern Cross Group. I’ll need to wait a few years before I apply, because you need to have had a PhD for a few years to qualify.

[personals]

Yesterday, as I was leaving, my grandfather gave me last week’s copy of the New York Review of Books. I’ve never actually read the New York Review of Books before, only dug out certain articles in old issues at the library, but this morning I spread the paper out on my breakfast table to accompany my meal. My curiosity increased with the uneven paper quality, some unusually thick, some thin and glossy like the weekly, airmailed, international edition of The Guardian, which my grandfather also subscribes to. I happily read a detailed two page paraphrase of the entire plot of one of Nadime Gordimer’s recent novels over two cups of coffee and a vegemite sandwich, but found nothing else to catch my attention until I got to the personals, right at the back.

Norway obviously isn’t big enough to have personals specifically for intellectuals. I’m sure there are no exclusive dating services for graduates from Ivy League schools and a handful of other universities (they include Cambridge and Oxford, for the sake of internationality), or for art lovers, or concerned singles, who care deeply about environmental issues. I’ve never seen Norwegian ads for phone numbers to ring to talk with dominatrixes with PhDs in creative writing from Ivy League universities. Each of the more personal personals in this paper is carefully penned, and all start with sentences like “A delicate beauty. Captivating, head-turning, petite, slim, successful artist and published writer. Known for clever silly rhymes, gracious entertaining, a certain shy grace that lights up a room.” I’m convinced the whole page is an elaborate hoax, part of an immersive gaming session, perhaps. If you write to any of those email addresses, or ring any of those numbers, you’ll find yourself entrapped in a fiction spanning your life, the web and everything ever printed.

[seven]

That thing womens’ magazines say, you know, that each night you don’t cleanse your skin adds seven years to the age of your skin? No way. If that were true, I would look several hundred years old. Now I expect I do look thirty-two years old, that would be appropriate, you know, but I don’t look as though I’m several hundred years old, I’m sure of that. Nah. I’ll remove the makeup in the morning.

[trilingual]

Hanne-Lovise’s seeing five films today, whereas I’ve only seen one in the whole film festival: Comandante, Oliver Stone’s 100 minute film of his 30 hour interview with Fidel Castro. It was a great movie, though god knows I’m sure they’re all liars, the lot of em, but it was an interesting film to watch on a human and a political level. What fascinated me most wasn’t political but linguistic: the three languages of the film as I saw it were so interwoven. Castro spoke Spanish that was simultaneously translated into Norwegian subtitles with his interpreter’s English translation sounding softly in the background a few seconds afterwards.

Actually, language is political. Norwegians presenting papers at international conferences are often more scared of speaking in English than of presenting their work to an audience. Castro lacked a proficient Russian-Spanish interpretor in the Cuban crisis, and according to him in this interview, linguistic misunderstandings rather than intention lay behind the idea that Cuba wanted to strike first in a nuclear attack, which almost led to war. Experiencing three languages moving together rather than one dominating the others was wonderful.

I think Castro was wearing Nikes! Or perhaps that was just a swoosh-shaped stain on the toe of his sneaker.

[quiet]

I returned from an hour of silent twilight on Ulriken to the stifling intensity of the city. There was talking everywhere, a shop, a siren, lasers piercing the sky, a tractor beside a half-dug ditch, a woman with a dog asking directions. I pushed my way through the noise and decided the click of my key in the lock would be the last sound for a while.

Except the hiss of melting chocolate, the pouring of milk, the gentle bubbling as it boils and the soft tapping of keys. I would whip the cream by hand, to hear nothing but the whisk’s rhythmic chick against the metal bowl, but no, by then I might be ready for sound again, for electricity.

[going, going, gone]

London: Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Mm.

[i can’t…]

I blogged this two years ago but obviously need a refresher: everyone thinks they’re a fraud. At least some of the time. I didn’t actually realise that until I read a book my sister lent me - I used to think it was just me. The magic book is a musician’s book but wonderful for any performer, and yes, most of us, probably all of us, actually, are performers in some sense of the word.

I’ve been telling myself “I can’t X” and “I can’t Y” a few too many times today. Good thing I caught myself doing it.

[slides]

Miligo just posted a long and thoughtful comment to my post on Powerpoint. I like how old discussions can reappear on the front page again when someone happens to comment on an old post. I like my prominent display of new comments.

So, to respond to Miligo, I went and found two examples of computer-designed, projected slides used in presentations: Stuart Moulthrop’s DAC 01 keynote and Mark Bernstein’s talk from Hypertext 01. They have daring and well-formulated ideas and visions, and they speak engagingly with warmth and gusto. Stuart and Mark are both amazing public speakers. They tend to have stunning slides, with evocative phrases and visual excitement. I love being swept up in the glow the flow of their presentations.

Neither Stuart nor Mark has made their slides in Powerpoint. I think they use Flash and Quicktime. But they’re slides, done on computers, projected on a screen. Perhaps the default templates of Powerpoint are bad news, but you don’t have to use them.

Mark and Stuart’s slides are available on the web but are hard to grasp, I suspect, without at least a memory of the words and the actions they were intended to be performed with. In that sense they are, indeed, ephemeral. But I don’t think they should be deleted.

[better than good]

They say here that if the sun shines on your birthday you’ve been good as gold all year. I’m taking today’s gentle drizzle as a sign that I’ve been exploring my more interesting sides of late. When you’re two to the power of five years old you get to leave good as gold behind.

[grumpy]

Grumpy. Long line at immigration office. Complicated citizenship rules. Phone queues. Spam. Back when in better mood.

[inspiration]

Jon shannonized his blog after talking with Noah.

[projected words]

I haven’t posted since Monday, and I hardly wrote then, this isn’t like me, is it? The week did pick up after picking up Noah at the airport, and today I even got to take my first photo of someone with words projected on them, always a favourite motif. This is from his performance at the Art Academy today; tomorrow he’s talking in my Digital Media Aesthetics course. When more awake I might actually get around to writing about what he’s been talking about.

[in brief]

Great weekend. Great city. Great friends. Horrid early flight, technical problems on plane, delayed. Disasterous teaching. Expect day to pick up when I pick up Aurora from school and then Noah from airport.

[roommate needed!]

My good friend Elin is looking for a roommate - if you know anyone in Cambridge (the one near Boston) who needs a place to live, please point them her way!

[ern and uncle jim]

Peter Carey is one of my favourite authors, and I’m obviously going to have to read his latest book: it’s based on the Ern Malley hoax, which my Great Uncle Jim was one of the instigators of. Uncle Jim wrote rather traditional poetry, you know, it rhymed and made sense, and he and a mate decided to reveal modernism as a load of nonsense by writing the complete works of the late “Ern Malley” on a Saturday afternoon and getting “Ern’s” widow sister to send them to a modernist poetry journal. The journal most gratifyingly printed them, declaring Ern a modernist genius, and it took months before the hoax was revealed. Of course the editor argued that “well, it was written by great poets so was great poetry even if meant as ridicule” while Uncle Jim and his mate claimed the entire works of Ern (or perhaps only a line or two) were copied out of a textbook on mosquitos and their habitats. Or something.

Obviously, Uncle Jim didn’t quite succeed in his noble fight against modernism. And I’m a bit worried about how he (or rather, the character inspired by Uncle Jim and his mate) is going to be portrayed in this book, too: “An arrogant young Australian poet named Christopher Chubb decides to teach his country a lesson about pretension and authenticity.” (amazon) Perhaps my concerns about truth and such are genetically determined.

[pressie!]

Ooh! A new digital camera! Must be my best birthday present ever and a month early!! (thanks!) I warn you, once the battery’s charged this may turn into a much more photoish blog!

[getting stuck in stupid ways]

Damn. It really would save me time to just learn Unix. And to remember about case sensitivity. And calm down instead of deciding it doesn’t work.

[powerpoint]

I’ve often thought that the people who criticise Powerpoint haven’t realised that you don’t have to use bulleted points and preset designs. Of course, if you do, Edward Tufte’s probably right: it’s boring and the overuse of templates indeed may “usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning". But you can ignore the templates, as David Byrne shows with some of his freeform Powerpoint slides in Wired.

[survey]

Roy‘d like bloggers to please participate in a survey to aid his honours research on blogs - you do have to invent answers to some questions, but they’re not too demanding: “How do you explain blogs to a friend” is one we’ve probably all had to deal with already.

[prize]

I’m thinking of awarding myself a week in the States after defending my thesis, as a prize for being so amazingly impressive and having managed to complete a PhD. (Yes, I know, I haven’t actually got it yet, and it could still be turned down, but I’m an optimist. And heck, if I don’t get it I’ll need a consolation prize!) The first week of December’s looking good - I’ll fly in to New York (because I was totally awestruck last time I was there, and because flights are cheap) and I’ll visit Elin in Boston, and my ticket will say Dr Walker instead of Ms Walker, but apart from that - are there any edifying things happening round then and there?

[publications]

I finally claimed my orphaned essays and publications and linked them from the left sidebar. For some reason I forgot them in my last redesign and yes, it took half a year to get around to the ten minute task of putting them back. Tut tut!

[decluttering work]

I just resubscribed to Flylady’s emails after my holidays, and brilliantly, this week’s missions are about developing sustainable office routines and decluttering your workspace and work time. Excellent timing.

[chocolate]

A recurring moment of parenthood I’d happily do without is that evening hour when you think your child’s asleep (by Jove, she should be) and you get out the chocolate only to hear a little voice call “What are you eating mummy? Why are you allowed to eat chocolate on weekdays?”

[named dread]

Hons, do go look at Judy Horacek’s August cartoons and scroll down to the bottom, that one about naming the nameless dread. Not a bad idea, huh?

[home]

Yes, I’m home, but not quite at work yet. I’ve read, written, played, eaten, drunk, run, climbed, swum, slept, spoken a lot of French.

My hedge needs trimming, the rose bush needs tying up and there’s weeding to do. My lavender’s not dried out yet, though. The lavender fields in Provence were harvested the second week in June, and flowers that have been left uncut are dry and grey. My Northern lavender bushes are still a delicious blue.

[Provence]

To my surprise, I discovered that Southern France is just like Australia, or at least just like the parts of Australia I love best: hot blue skies, dusty red earth, dry yellow fields and trees and plants that fulfil exactly the same functions as the eucalyptus-scented flora of Australia, though their scents are different. The coast has village after village exactly like the trendy beachside suburbs in large Australian cities, the cafés, parking slots and houses exact parallels, though Riviera beaches are skinny and mean compared even to Melbourne’s city beaches, and noone would dream of going to Melbourne for its beaches. Inland Provence has ancient villages piled high against hillsides, but the interiors, the gardens and the cuisine are modern Australian: terracotta tiles, space, herbs, relaxed meals and delicious food.

At Ségriès a friend from Queensland was surprised that I found Provence so similar to Australia. She’s used to a tropical Australia, while my Australia is drier and, of course, the stuff of dreams of home more than everyday routine. When my sister arrived (born an expat as I was) she echoed my words without having heard them: It’s amazing! It’s just like Australia!

There are differences, of course. There are fields of lavender, Roman ruins and tiny villages every few kilometres. There is incredible rudeness as well as genuine friendliness and charm. Quite often waiters will roll their eyes at your impertinence in existing, especially if you don’t completely understand the menu. But if you speak French and ask questions that the person you’re talking to can easily answer (Is it “une glace” or “un glace"?) they’re almost certain to be friendly rather than rude. There are no Swedish tourists. In fact, though the Côte d’Azur is obviously tourist-infested, almost all the tourists from from other parts of France and you can spend days at the beach and in restaurants without hearing any language but French.

[languid]

I’m listening to the very languid mix tape (well, CD) that Alex gave me when he was in town, and I’m drinking beer, and enjoying the cooling late evening rays of sun shining through the window and onto my shoulder, and rewriting the blog entry for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Thanks for your feedback! And don’t worry, I’ll rewrite it again tomorrow, sans beer, before scooting off for my month in France.

[new mac?]

Our Mac consultant is brilliant. Yesterday I told him I finally got the faculty to approve getting me a new Mac. “So what kind do you want?” he asked. “I was thinking a 12 inch powerbook with a nice external screen and wireless and extra RAM and a bigger harddrive", I said, hopefully. Diego smiled, quietly, and today sent me an email suggesting that this might be what I was looking for. I’ll take the room as well!

[how to fake french]

The wife of a Frenchman let me in on a secret method of holding up your side in a conversation in French even when you can hardly speak the language. You simply need three phrases:

This mean’s “It’s true", and can be said in many different intonations for varied effect.

Now this would often be accompagnied by a shake of the head and a concerned look, and it means that “It’s not the same", or less directly, “but that’s different". Your final phrase is

This one means “I don’t agree", and it’s the most daring aspect of the cunning ploy. It seems risky, doesn’t it? Hearing this phrase, I immediatey asked the Frenchman’s wife what on earth you do if your conversation partner calls you on this. How on earth are you going to explain why you disagree?

Well, that’s where the utter genius of this three-phrase plan comes into play. You simply go back to your second phrase, shake your head and say

The Frenchman’s wife swears that this simple technique has got her through years of communicating with her inlaws. And if that’s true, I reckon it’ll hold up for my July in France.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that I’ll actually be able to follow a French conversation without faking it.

[why norwegians think it’s summertime now]

This joke is sadly true, and explains why we Norwegians are all thrilled that summer’s here, although it’s only about 10°C today… It’s light until 11 pm though! That’s pretty good! I got the joke in email and can’t find it on the web, so I’m generously posting it here:

(more…)

[fall]

Everything was more or less gliding along in that mode of stress where there’s something to do every minute but things actually work until yesterday afternoon, when, having dinner at my mum’s house with various friends, my daughter’s dad rang to ask why she wasn’t on the doorstep in a party dress for his dad’s 60th birthday celebration. Rearrangements were made, her hair was brushed, stains declared passable, a car rerouted and they got to the birthday dinner OK but I lost it. Luckily when you’re at your mother’s house you can leave the dinner guests and go upstairs and try to sleep instead. Since then all my plans and lists have fallen apart and I’ve just been surfing mindlessly amidst open suitcases filled with too few clothes and too many things I have to return. I need to go back into minute-to-minute mode I think. Right now: brush teeth, pack toothbrush and clean undies and get on bus to the pedagogy seminar. After that I can worry about everything else.

Thanks everyone for all the congratulations! It’s been wonderful seeing all the names of people I know and people I don’t :)

[15 millimetres of fame]

So I was in Dagbladet today. Suffice it to say that the woman who sold me my copy did not recognise me from the microscopic photo just before the sports pages. The main headline was “De utleverer seg på nettet” (They deliver themselves/tell all/expose themselves on the net).

[choose your own truth]

I’m in a foul mood today. You may invent your own backstories to that.

[eggs and wine]

It’s summer. Yes, I know it’s only Easter and there’ll be rain and maybe even sleet before it’s really, truly summer, but today was a summer’s day. My good friend B is in town for the holidays and Aurora and I spent the day with her and her kids at her parents’ house, not in the country at all but surrounded by pots filled with seedlings, vegetable beds ready for sowing, budding fruit trees, children trying to do cartwheels on the lawn and the constant crowing of dozens of roosters and hens next door. Aurora wept to leave her favourite hen, a small golden creature that was strangely contented to be carried endlessly in the crook of Aurora’s arm. We have eggs for breakfast tomorrow, ordinary hens’ eggs and little tiny vaktel eggs that look exactly like Easter eggs, small and speckled. We were outdoors all day, and oh, it’s so wonderful to eat outside after a long, dark winter. It was so restful to spend a day at a house I’ve visited regularly for nearly twenty years. Especially now that they serve me wine and don’t make me do the dishes ;)

The world around me is on holiday and there’ll not be much blogging from here until after Easter.

[bread]

Sometimes spam is brilliant:

The bread is delicious and miraculously stops you being hungry for at least five or six hours after eating it! Absolutely amazing, no? In addition, the Hunza people, who are the 2000 year old people who had the original recipe, are a glorious race:

Just imagine, bread that makes you neat, clean, intelligent and friendly and gives you a developed bosom.

The most amazing thing is that the housewife wants 25 Euros for a recipe for the bread - and, hang on, the housewife’s name is Lotte and her husband (the world-famous Hunza researcher) is called Lars - no wonder they’re into baking their own bread - they’re Scandinavians! And uh, Hunza? Kind of sounds like Hansa written in English, huh? What a damn fine business plan for a couple of Bergeners abroad.

I’ve baked a few loaves of bread in my life that I could easily pass off as appetite-suppressants… Want the recipe? 25 Euros, thank you!

[good things]

1. daffodils in the garden
2. the smell of mint ready to grow
3. the blue bench I painted, warm in the sun
4. twenty degrees
5. glass of wine
6. child asleep
7. quiet

[swim]

Those of you travelling to Melbourne next month, like me, to go to the Digital Arts and Culture conference, may be interested to realise that swimming in the sea in Melbourne now will be a very similar experience to in the sea on a hot Norwegian summer’s day. Except there’s a horizon that’s not a mountain. And other people will think you’re a maniac for in 17? water.

[what to do if a friend has a miscarriage]

Thinking of my miscarriages I did a usenet search from back when I was active in misc.kids.pregnancy, and I found this wonderful post, written just three weeks after my first miscarriage, where I wrote about how my friends had helped me and hurt me. It’s a really good post. People seem to be better at helping friends through breakups than through miscarriages - I think because breakups are less taboo, and so many of us have actually experienced them.

[demo]

I’m in Trondheim now, showing people here how to blog :)

[tired]

I’m tired. Sometimes I wish there was an autopilot-button on life.

[quality vs competence]

Why, I wonder, is the English translation for Kvalitetsreformen not the Quality Reform but the Competence Reform? Mind you all the options sound kind of weird, don’t they?

[cotton wool]

I’m nursing a cold, keeping my sink shining, reviewing stacks of papers for Hypertext 03, trying to keep enthusiastic about my thesis, trying to finish that cursed chapter about political web games and I feel totally unbloggish. Unmostthingsish, actually. Well not totally, I guess, since I find strange consolation in simply writing this, but I doubt there’ll be much enthusiasm here till I get rid of this cotton wool that’s stuck in my brain.

[funding!]

I got travel funding to go to Digital Arts and Culture in Melbourne in May! I was sure I wouldn’t since I’m on month-to-month contracts this semester and so I assumed that would disqualify me, but I’m in the list, oh, wow, I’m amazed. I was going to go anyway, but the no-funding solution had me on a diet of bread and water and no new contact lenses or books for the next half year, so, oh, brilliant. Brilliant.

[SMS essay]

On Kairosnews I found a link to an article about a girl whose teacher couldn’t understand an essay she turned in in SMS language. The guys at Kairos find this pretty intriguing, and I have to agree. Here’s an excerpt:

And having written that I notice the Americans on Kairosnews have called it IM speak, and that CNN calls it text messaging language while I assume it’s SMS speak. I suppose it’s both - but Americans don’t do SMS, do they. Anyway, it half-baffles me but I like it anyway. (I’m an old fogey: I use the dictionary on my mobile phone so I spell normally. And in IM I can type plain English much faster than those codes.)

[update 7/3: Torill’s posted a response where she points out that this is an act of rebellion, not degeneration. Absolutely. And btw, email addresses are optional in the comments :)]

[update 11/3: A senior high school teacher I met in Narvik told me he uses SMS language deliberately in his teaching - he gets his students to translate a regular text to SMS language, and the discuss the results in relation to the history of language, grammer and its development through the ages. I assume many other teachers do similar things.]

[time]

Yesterday I was fiddling with colours, toying with stylesheets and thinking to myself how much easier it is to refurbish a blog than to, say, paint my kitchen. Then I started counting the hours I’ve spent learning MoveableType, adapting templates, rebuilding stylesheets, dabbling with colours. It adds up to at least the 3-4 hours a day for five days it took me to paint the kitchen. At least I don’t have to put up with the smell of drying paint. And I can use the kitchen.

Amazingly the blog refurbishing (still, incidentally, transitional) has coincided with a burst of writing on my thesis. Which I’ve promised myself will be absolutely utterly done by the end of April. Yup.