Wie bitte?

At the risk of turning into the Emeli Sandé of academic guestbloggers...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 17:06:00 +0100

As part of Women’s History Month, the lovely people at ACLAIIR have published my post on rebellious nuns and sixteenth-century Spanish women neurologists:
https://aclaiirblog.wordpress.com/

Guest Blogging Again

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 17:04:00 +0100

Starting Your PhD: What Past Me and Present You Should Know is borne out of conversations with fellow postgraduates and other impromptu fieldwork involving much tea-based therapy and a variety of baked goods. It has modest ambitions but much empathy, a hastily assembled homage to the support network that provides much appreciated encouragement in the research marathon that is a thesis.

Interested? Then check out the full post at the Woman in Portuguese and Spanish Studies webpage:

http://www.wisps.org.uk/starting-your-phd-what-past-me-and-present-you-should-know/

Podcast

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:25:56 +0100

Sulking in Sepia: Julia de Asensi (1859 - 1921)

One of my first papers got turned into a podcast. Marvel at my ability to say ‘uhm’ 150 times - I wish that was an exaggeration - and fail to casually throw in a ‘Manichean Weltanschauung’ and a ‘Althusserian interpellation.’ If you use those words in everyday conversation, then this is right up your street, although I suspect this particular urban stretch may contain a few tumbleweeds passing by. Also the podcast contains the occasional Spanish quotation, so this ‘up your street’ is at this point less transited than an imaginary street on Apple Maps. Is not so much the road less travelled as the non-existing one.

Listen to my podcast here.

*Also I’m not Dr Rocío Rødtjer yet - I haven’t been awarded my doctorate. yet.*

Guest Blogging

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:07:08 +0100

This month I’m moonlighting for the International Gothic Association as the resident postgraduate blogger thus neglecting this Tumblr even further. Seriously it’s so abandoned it’s starting to feel like the House of Usher (No, not the rapper, that would be the Crib of Usher). My posts are aimed at a specific audience (entries have bibliographies) but I do sneak in the occasional joke:
http://www.iga.stir.ac.uk/blog.php

Pieta by Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1499 Vs Lana Del Rey 2011

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 23:42:20 +0100

Pieta by Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1499 Vs Lana Del Rey 2011

Favourite Slide from Today’s Presentation ‘Death and...

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 23:19:33 +0100

Favourite Slide from Today’s Presentation ‘Death and the Maiden’

"Some patient academic of the future will, on seeing “Transformers 2,” doubtless find patterns of..."

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 21:09:20 +0100

“Some patient academic of the future will, on seeing “Transformers 2,” doubtless find patterns of local topical meaning—portents of the Arab Spring in the fight over the pyramids, evidence of the debate over the future of the automobile industry, and a hundred other things. But people just like violent otherworldly stuff, and give it a lot of non-allegorical license to do its thing.”

- Adam Gopnik, in his review of Elaine Pagels on the Book of Revelation in The New Yorker. (via blech)

LOLcats and Victorian Serialized Novels

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 03:10:00 +0100

How We Become Familiar With New Technology

‘Memes don’t exist, tell your friends’ read one of the many novelty t-shirts my boyfriend owned when we first met. This was more than a decade ago and back then I associated the word ‘meme’ with evolutionary biology and the work of Richard Dawkins. I also thought that Java was just a type of coffee. This has changed with the advent of social media, and memes are now linked with spelling-challenged cats, which is probably not the evolution Dawkins had in mind. But LOLcats are definitely a step up from those HILARIOUS chain letters with which an elderly relative used to spam your hotmail account. And those of his coworkers, because back then if you wanted to share something, you had to know people’s email addresses. Crazy, I know. There was no ‘like’ button, no ‘retweet’ icon that allowed you to share it with your nearest and dearest and the 300 other people that had accumulated like layers of sediment in your account. And because it is so easy and fast to share the latest meme, LOLcats are positively fossils in the many Ages of the Internet. In the last couple of years, moving memes - animated GIFs - have become increasingly popular as pithy little replies that encapsulate a specific mood. They are like the internet equivalent of representing our feelings through the Medium of Dance.

‘What’s the point of memes? You could spend that time reading a book’. This is true, but everybody is familiar with the book as a medium, less so with the internet. Of course, this has not always been the case, and for most of human history the 1% referred to those people who could read, and the 99% were the ones who couldn’t. This all changed in the 19th century when education increasingly became the priority it is today and literacy rates started growing significantly. Additionally the Industrial Revolution saw the introduction of new technologies that made printing cheaper and more efficient, as well as new modes of transport that made distribution faster. Add a confident and burgeoning middle class perennially on the lookout for new business opportunities and you have the boom of the publishing industry that characterises the first decades of the nineteenth century. Suddenly books meant serious money, in that they were still considered a luxury item for most people, but newspapers and magazines were accessible and this became the golden age of the serialized novel. These were stories aimed to thrill their readers and the cliffhanger endings of each chapter were a hook that would guarantee the purchase of the next issue.

As literacy was becoming less of a sign of social distinction, some cultivated minds, particularly budding authors interested in exerting social influence, started to actively demarcate the line between art and commerce. The distinction between high and low culture thus became deeply entrenched in social discourse. Because more people could read, aspiring writers in the second half of the century became increasingly eager to present themselves as producers of original stimulating works as opposed to the mass-produced expressions such as the shilling-shockers and penny-dreadfuls that were by now being so enthusiastically churned out. Influential literary critics and other arbiters of taste accused serialized novels of being conventional, stereotypical, cliché-laden. And so they were, but this was not a flaw, this was the aim. Authors, publishers and readers were initially not interested in aesthetic innovation because there was frankly very little to innovate on. The novel was still a relatively new genre, shown in the confusion of terminologythat surrounded it. How long was a novel meant to be? Was it just a very long tale in print? Most potential readers had no genre expectations because being able to decipher printed symbols on a page was a relatively new business to begin with. The aim of all those archetypes, conventions and repetitions that populate these early forays into mass media can be viewed as a grammar with which people gradually became familiar. After some exposure, readers would get a thrill from spotting patterns, from recognizing clichés and feeling part of community, a growing community that had got to grips with these new - frankly intimidating - things called printed words.

All new technologies are scary and people are generally averse to change. That is, until you show them the basics and then they will latch onto it like crazed marmosets onto a banana cargo. Which brings me to this new scary technology called the internet. When I met my boyfriend he was part of the (internet) 1% and I was part of the 99%. He is of course still more technologically literate than me, but now even my 91-year-old granddad has a Facebook account and emails me enormous multi-megabyte photos of his holidays. And who am I to lecture about file compression? When he was born, ‘talkies’ was common term, not just one employed by people doing Film Studies. Now I can talk to him in Denmark from this little square that also carries all my music and can take pictures, even record videos that I can instantly zap to him. For all I know magic pixies riding on invisible unicorns are carrying these moving images up to Copenhagen. It somehow works, but I have no idea how. And it’s changing all time. The internet is still a pretty daunting place and most of us have this nagging feeling that we are bluffing, that we deep down have no idea what’s going on. It’s still a new technology and we don’t know what to expect in much the same way that our newly-literate ancestors didn’t know what to expect from the printed media or its future possibilities. Memes in this way can be seen as the internet equivalent of serialized novels. Memes are meant to be repetitive, archetypal and easily reproducible and remixable. New memes build on or reference this archive that we have accumulated over the years. Recognizing the patterns gives us a sense of belonging, that we belong to a growing community that feels comfortable sharing cat pictures with captions, even moving pictures, like GIFs. Or uploading talkies to YouTube. It’s a way of easing us into this new world and familiarizing us with intimidatingly sophisticated technology (magic pixies!) in a seemingly trite and simplified manner. The future is bright, the future is scary but Nyan cat will help us.

And no, this should not be read as a particular wordy excuse for my undying love of kitten videos.

“Inspired” by Apple: Apple Keynote Bingo

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:14:37 +0100

“Inspired” by Apple: Apple Keynote Bingo:

inspiredbyapple:

I figured that what we probably needed for Wednesday is a scorecard for Apple Keynote Bingo. We hope you like it. We’d like to show it to you. So here it is.

Don’t forget to read the rules. And - why not - a hashtag, #AppleKeynoteBingo.

Thanks, as before, to David Moss…

Tumblr collaborations

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:57:00 +0100

It’s been a while since I have posted anything on this blog. I will get round it, particularly this week when I have a couple of deadlines looming and I’m being lulled by the sweet siren calls of procrastination. In the meantime I’ve been moonlighting for …Wins The Internet, a site cowritten with two far wittier friends. If anything you should check out their posts.

winstheinternet: As Grace Dent put it on Twitter, “the...

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:35:08 +0100

winstheinternet:

As Grace Dent put it on Twitter, “the strongest reason to have kids I’ve ever seen”. In noway is the not fantastically amazing.

Frankly, The Internet, you can close for the day, sit on the sofa and read the papers. This Wins The Interent.

“Inspired” by Apple: Some limericks about SOPA

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:58:43 +0100

“Inspired” by Apple: Some limericks about SOPA:

inspiredbyapple:

There once was an bill called SOPA;
which resulted in blackouts all over.
Wikipedia went down*,
making school kids frown
in the US, Oz and Europa.

The bill’s meant to target “rogue sites”
but it’s drafted so widely it might
catch others which play
by the rules so they may
be closed in the dead of…

Hashtag Dystopia

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 23:46:00 +0100

Few things can make me as misanthropic as the recurrent popularity of doomsday druids. These days, it seems, slapping “dystopia” on anything automatically furnishes every old rant with deep social commentary and perennial fears towards ongoing technological progress masquerades as shocking incisive reflections. And the more apocalyptic their visions, the shallower they become. I call it “nihilistic porn”. No character development, no plot, just the money shot.

Which brings me to Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a veritable hashtag stew of tweetable nihilism, wherein the viewer is spoon-fed Brooker’s trademark hyperbolic grumbling like an unsuspecting French goose. There’s no food for thought, only despairing dyspepsia, because everything is broken in Black Mirror. Every episode is a bleak yet hollow void with an almost complete lack of sympathetic characters taking part in this pantomime dystopia. It is the Daily Mail’s much ridiculed Broken Society but repackaged for Guardian readers by covering it with a shiny new coat of New Media buzzwords. In the first episode, in which the Prime Minister is forced to copulate with a sow live on TV to save the nation’s royal sweetheart, characters are unable to articulate any thought without wedging Youtube, Twitter or Facebook into every remark. Brooker’s version of Newspeak has replaced full stops and commas with hashtags as punctuation marks. What is initially amusing soon reaches saturation point, illustrated by an armed soldier who mistakenly aims at a journalist believing her to be the princess’s abductor. Instead of apologizing or ensuring she is not wounded, he shoots at her mobile and quips “There’s your RTS award!”. At this point I was expecting a ham-fisted Abu Ghraib reference to round it off.

The second episode set its sights on reality TV, so all us viewers who have Ocado on speed dial can sit and quaff about the plebe who watches The X Factor sans the required ironic hat. Then we can all make disparaging and completely original remarks about wheat products and circuses. The story is set in a nightmarish panopticon where the 99% are forced to pedal bikes all day - the reason is never given - and sedated through forced exposure to pornography. That’s right, by now we have come to understand that ‘subtle’ is not part of Hashtag Dystopia’s vocabulary.

The third and final part of the arc has been concocted by Jesse Armstrong, best known for the Peep Show and for being one of the writers for the brilliant political satire The Thick of It. It reworks the Perfect Recall trope familiar to science fiction and comic readers, and famously addressed in the Jorge Luis Borges short story Funes the Memorious (1942). In the Black Mirror version, a new technology allows people to carry a chip that records everything and can be played back on demand, with the possibility of sharing it on those -you guessed it! - omniscient menacing screens that rule our lives. Nobody else seems to have a particular good memory because the story very quickly descends into the classic alarmist ‘New Technology Ruins People’s Lives. And This Time We Mean It!’ Yes, there is the atomic bomb and countless other horrific examples. But take the internet - What would people have imagined 10 years ago if they knew we would all have portable devices that let us access and broadcast repository of information. I’m sure no forecast would have included lolcats. I will leave the Arab Spring to more respectable bloggers.

For somebody so seemingly intimate with new technology and who still - rightly so - extolls the creative possibilities of video games, Charlie Brooker sure takes an unnecessarily paranoid attitude towards progress more characteristic of somebody eligible for a Freedom Pass. Particularly when he occupies a privileged position from where he should be showing a more nuanced picture. This tirade is borne out of a sense of disappointment from somebody who loved TVGoHome and Screenwipe, but the misanthropic coat Brooke is fond of wearing has barely been changed and it is starting to exude a faint whiff of the reactionary.

Post-Rant

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 23:06:00 +0100

This uninformed rant was inspired by a recent visit to ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990’ at the V&A Museum. What follows is an attempt to articulate my misgivings about Postmodernism, understood by few and used by many, with a brief description of its predecessor Modernism, in the hope that a comparison between the two might sharpen the edges of blurry Postmodernism.

The more I think about it, the more I realise how much I dislike the term Postmodernism. What exactly does it stand for? The manipulative nature of its essentially empty rhetoric irks me, as when the Daily Mail resorts to ‘common sense’ or some luminaire in the Literary Review ponderously declaims that we inhabit a post-ideological world, then relentlessly pushes their own agenda, wrapped in an oratorical blanket of increasingly fatigued and meaningless prefixes. Postmodernism is the most recent movement and so exerts a great influence on our world-view, and yet there have been previous movements, and there will be something post-postmodernism, whatever we decide to name it. If I knew this future buzzword, I would probably not be a rich woman, but I would certainly get misquoted a lot, and you know that the more you are misquoted the more people you have reached. And the fewer have read you.

But I am ignorant as to what the future holds. Frankly, I am not even sure about the state of the present. That there is a retrospective on Postmodernism at the V&A would indicate that it is firmly in the past, further confirmed by the subheading ‘Style and Subversion: 1970-1990’. And yet the term ‘postmodern’ still gets its fair share of airplay in 2011. What I have noticed is that its temporal proximity - whether it has happened or is still unfolding - has led many to lose perspective. There is nothing revolutionary about Postmodernism, no more than there was about the Enlightenment or Romanticism. What makes it special is precisely the same immediacy that has rendered us so short-sighted; We are living it. Nothing has changed in the grand scheme of things, yet everything is different, as it always is and always will be.

Thus we are uncertain if we inhabit Postmodern times, or what this entails, apart from this penchant for sticking arbitrary prefixes on words to increase their emotional resonance and impact. ‘Neo’ has become the preferred, catch-all, semantically slurred yet emotionally charged prefix for right-wing resurgences - neoliberalism, neocon, neonazism, neoprene. ‘Post’, on the other hand, is the default indicator for the discourse deconstruction and ‘decentredness’ that ‘postmodernism’ and ‘poststructuralism’ celebrate. Whatever that means. We are constantly reminded that there is no ‘truth’ to be found, that everything is subjective and the idea of an objective independent reality is a mere mirage. The era of grand all-encompassing narratives like Christianity or Marxism is over. Yet people keep telling each other stories, only this time with more prefixes. These days, one has to muse about ‘subversion’ and ‘dystopia’, suspiciously close sometimes to the old ‘progress’ and ‘utopia’ but masquerading under less politically charged names, and without the whiff of fascism that ‘progress’ now gives off.

So what is ‘Postmodernism’? It peppers our academic speech and generously seasons our (my) half-baked remarks about art, music, and society. Even ‘conditions’. What exactly is the postmodern condition? Postmodernism was always one of those words that was semantically unstable, because it defined itself against the equally porous ‘modern’. The latter is normally applied to the first half of the 20th century - the era of Modernism. It is the term given to different artistic movements that rejected objectivity in favour of subjectivity — no longer was it about what we saw, but how we saw it. This was partly spurred — as are all new cultural expressions — by new technological developments. With (for instance) the increased popularity and availability of the camera, painters no longer needed to strive to perfectly reproduce reality. Instead they started to ponder the exact nature of this reality. They revisited that age old ontological conundrum that had taken Plato to his imaginary caves — what, if anything, is the essence of something? Picasso famously painted a violin from all angles simultaneously, which created a distorted image, but one still recognisable as a violin. In literature, the omniscient narrator and linear narrative were abandoned in favour of stream-of-consciousness and fragmented narrative, traditionally interpreted a reactions to the the totalitarian discourses and blind belief in progress that had led to both world wars.

Unsurprisingly, many people became wary of panoptic narratives with such an unwavering faith in their authority, and which caused so much pain and destruction in Europe. Modernism, then, is about the rejection of this authority. Modernists do not share the teleological views of history popularly associated with their predecessors, the Victorians. The two world wars put a dent in the the idea that humanity is progressing, that it has a final destiny towards which it has been advancing (‘telos’ being ‘end’ or ‘purpose’). Postmodernism is not particularly fond of grandiose statements either and, like Modernism, it is also characterised by fragmentation. The difference lies in how they approach this SHATTERED EXISTENTIAL MIRROR. Modernism traditionally laments the loss of this age of innocence in esoteric elegies about waste lands whilst Postmodernism famously celebrates this fragmentation through ironic pastiches and meta-patchworks of intertextuality set to groovy soundtracks. Basically, Postmodernists like Tarantino films and Tumblr, with its assorted quotations, random fonts, existential Instagrams and amusing gifs. What this definition tells us is that Postmodernism has really good PR. Any undergraduate who has trudged through the compulsory Critical Theory module will tell you that Baudrillard & co are not precisely happy chappies when they postulate the loss of objectivity, fixed meaning, and even reality in magnificently obscure sentences that sometimes undermine the most basic premises of grammar. They fill their intentionally playful and ambiguous prose with an irresistible intertextual insouciance. Apparently. (???)

Modernism, on the other hand, lacks such professional PR, partly because everybody involved is kicking up the daisies in Elliot’s wasteland, and can no longer defend themselves. Also, partly because everybody of my generation had to read Mrs Dalloway at school, a book that contains a disappointingly low number of ninjas and a complete lack of 70s blaxploitation musical references. The classic stereotype of the Modernist woman is of course Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide, and is hailed as part of the literary canon. But Modernists, particularly female, were not all as despondent as this portrayal. Many women were rather excited about the emancipatory possibilities that industrialisation brought. And as devastating as the two armed conflicts were, the absence of men meant that women had to replace them in factories, hospital wards, offices, even in the streets as bus drivers, as well as other public spaces normally reserved to men (they were sent packing back to their domestic spheres after the war, but the seed had been planted).

So things are not as simple as they seem. I want to finish this post with the classic ‘it’s complicated’, which is a rather fittingly postmodern end to this unfocused rant. I will, of course, describe my argument as ‘fluid’. Postmodernism - whatever it is - has claimed a monopoly on ambiguity. And yes, the irony is not lost on me. Ambiguity, together with subversion, seems to be one of its most frequent escorts whenever Postmodernism puts its ironic hat on and goes for a spin round the cultural landscape. Perhaps that is the reason why I have developed a dislike for Postmodernism — because it is so omniscient and at same time nobody can explain exactly what it is. A bit like gravity really. When it comes to gravity, few people gripe about the impossibility of escaping the laws of physics. But can we escape the Postmodern condition? Are we all Postmodern now? This was the question posed at the recent V&A retrospective, as we left the exhibition to the sound of New Order. What a fatuous thing to ask. Is this meant to be food for thought, something to ponder on the way back home? Of course we are all Postmodern now. And post-Renaissance, and post-Enlightenment, and post-Industrial Revolution, and post-Victorian and post-Capitalist and first-past-the-post and any other post you care to think about. It is all part of our cultural DNA.

Postmodernism has just made us hyperaware of the hybrid nature of our culture, that we are all assembled from the different discourses and ideologies that we have inherited and picked up along our trajectory. Just as it is difficult in this post-Freudian era to analyse our actions without resorting to the language of psychoanalysis, Postmodernism has simply given us a new vocabulary with which to articulate our experiences and preoccupations. Some are specific to our time and the moral dilemmas and problematic developments that advancement brings, such as cloning, or the internet. Other are age-old longings revisited, like the yearn for authenticity and distinction, now threatened by new technologies that can easily and cheaply reproduce anything, from an image to an expensive leather bag. All movements and cultural expressions have attempted to conceptualise and give voice to cultural neurosis and anxieties (in a post-Freudian era _everything_ is an anxiety). This is not new to Postmodernism. I’m still not sure if Postmodernism isn’t just Modernism in drag.

It’s complicated.

It's Grim Up North

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 11:27:00 +0200

I finally got round to watching The Killing (or Fobrydelsen, to use the original title), which most English viewers will by now know actually translates to “the crime”. And for somebody so fond of Scandinavian crime as me, it was positively - cliché alert - criminal that I had yet to be acquainted with Sarah Lund’s splendid collection of knitwear. When it was originally screened back in Denmark I was living in London, blissfully ignorant of the jumper fever that had gripped the nation. It certainly didn’t grip my family. When the BBC decided to finally broadcast it, I was based in Berlin. True, the Germans acquired the rights too and then dubbed it. But I didn’t want to see Das Verbrechen, I wanted to see Forbrydelsen. It was already quite amusing watching the subtitled version with my English boyfriend and noticing that many of the colourful expressions with which Copenhageners regularly pepper their speech had not made it into English. “Tager du pis?” became the prim “are you being serious?”. Even taking into account differing cultural expectations, it was always my impression that a great number of Brits swear like perpetually pissed sailors. Which is one of the reasons why I feel so at home here.

Anyway, my Berlin bubble kept being burst by news of this paradigm shifting Danish export that held BBC4 viewers - my people - enthralled every week. The Guardian was crushing so hard on Sarah Lund’s Faroese wool - henceforth referred as THE JUMPER - that it even made the smooth grey Mad Men suits turn green with jealousy. The Killing was even threatening to usurp The Wire’s crown and to steal its status as THE MOST NUANCED PORTRAYAL OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY EVER. People would ask me if it was always this dark in Denmark (it’s called winter) and how you pronounced “Theis Birk Larsen” or “Vagn Skærbæk” without dislocating your vocal chords (you can’t). And did Danes really wear THE JUMPER? It soon became clear that I was contractually obliged to see it, lest I risk expulsion from the Guardian guild, particularly before the broadcast of the second series this autumn when I would be back on the island. So I dutifully bought the entire series on iTunes and prepared to go on a Scandinavian noir bender, because if it was anything like The Wire the default mode is always “boxed set binge”.

I liked it. I really did. It was a bittersweet treat to have so much screen time dedicated to the family of the murdered girl. It was a reminder that every crime has its victim, a rather obvious point but rarely one developed in the standard formula followed by crime fiction, where the focus is on the investigator. And the acting was solidly lead by the very talented Sophie Grabøl and the eminently watchable and charismatic Lars Mikkelsen (he and his brother Mads Mikkelsen take up far too much prime estate in my head. The scene where Lars takes off his shirt - to show his vulnerability of course - made my ovaries stand up and give a loud standing ovation). Perennially rainy Copenhagen was bathed in lush non-light that made perpetual winter look positively attractive. Hell, it even made me homesick, a feeling I normally only experience in summer.

Now I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade, as if anybody at this point would notice, but groundbreaking it wasn’t. Maybe BBC 4 viewers haven’t read and watched as much crime fiction as I (probably a good thing), but to me it was blindingly obvious who it was from around episode 3. The meta-narrative was just too predictable. It was meant to be dark and gritty, which normally translates into the expected shattering of domestic bliss and the crumble of institutions that are dear to us, like democracy. And it was it was 20 episodes long, so you could watch the first three episodes and the last two and not miss too much background, apart from more red herrings than a Christmas Day smorgasbord. You _know_ that the suspect in episode 4 was not going to be the killer. But then maybe he was, because I had repeatedly been told that The Killing challenged more conventions than an Iranian art house film at Sundance. In fact, since I’ve heard it had such a shocking ending, I spent considerable time building increasingly byzantine theories to dissuade myself from the textbook ending I had already sensed earlier in the series. I was desperately seeking subversion, I _wanted_ to see semiotic subversion everywhere, like a poststructuralist third-wave feminist analysing Almodóvar cinematography. This never came. As much as I enjoyed watching it, it would have been a less neurotic experience, and therefore slightly anticlimactic, if viewers had filled in my Scandinavian bingo card beforehand. I could thus have more accurately assessed its revolutionary credentials.

I would like people to complete it _before_ the start of season 2 due this autumn:

1) Does it assume GRITTY means REALISTIC?

2) Does everybody end up depressed and miserable? And by everybody I mean everybody. Scandinavians are very literal people. We’re not only talking about the victim/s family/partner/friends but also the police, and neighbours, and distant relatives and acquaintances. And their Facebook friends. The police’s Facebook friends. The Facebook friends of Facebook friends. That random guy in episode 2 who was asking for directions. His Facebook friends. In fact everybody involved should just join Google+ and add each other to the all-engulfing circle of misery.

3) Does there seem to be a shortage of lightbulbs / sunlight in general?

4) If the investigator is male, is he an alcoholic? Does he have - at least one - a failed marriage? If she is female, does she get branded mentally unstable at some point? Does her long-suffering partner leave her at some point? (I presume that Sarah Lund is also familiar with this convention and has already prepared for this inevitability by dating a psychologist.)

5) Does anybody have time to finish eating their already harried kebab, pizza or burger grabbed from the local take away run by the token friendly “totally integrated” immigrant to remind the viewer that Scandinavian capitals are like SO MULTIETHNIC (read “gritty”, see point 1)

6) Corruption: is something rotten in the state of Denmark (read: EVERYTHING, see point 2)

7) Is the happy Scandinavian welfare model just a mirage? Are you being shown the dark underbelly of this seemingly perfect society where everybody is actually miserable, or will be soon (see point 2) and from which not even their stylish knitwear or flair for interior decoration can protect them?

8) Do bad things happen in woods? Do people go into woods despite knowing that bad things happen in woods? Are they familiar with Hansel and Gretel?

9) The weather heightens the misery:

Choose between these options:

a) It’s raining, ideally a constant drizzle that makes everybody soggy and miserable. A corpse appears. Everybody’s day, especially the corpse’s, just got more soggy and miserable.

b) It has been heavily snowing, and a frozen corpse of woman appears the day after. It’s always a woman and she is always described as a macabre ice figure or a morbidly beautiful snow queen. I think there’s some metaphor or deep cultural commentary here. So far I’ve only managed “don’t be a woman when it snows in Scandinavia”.

c) There’s a heat wave, i.e. More than 20 degrees celsius and a less than fragrant corpse appears in the woods (see point 8). The investigator/s spend the entire book sweating like an overripe stilton. Apparently nobody has heard of air conditioning in Scandinavia. This mystery is never resolved.

10) It stars one of the Mikkelsen brothers, preferably shirtless. If it contains both, just drop everything and alert me immediately.This point might not be necessarily related with any of the ones above. Or the article at all.

I will add more points as they occur to me but that should do for the moment.

Beards, Brows and Procrastination

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 01:07:27 +0200

Today was one of those muggy languid days that compels you to dramatically lower your standards to reap a sense of achievement, any achievement, at the end of it. Or dispose of standards altogether. In this way such mundane pedestrian activities such as cheese eating, wall staring or even hand-eye coordination will seem like a veritable tour de force.

Speaking of which, I was browsing GQ today.

Reason 540 why I hate GQ: Spinning some vacuous bile about the fear of appearing middlebrow as if you were the freaking Bourdieu of coolness, while failing to mention that the high/low culture divide is a deeply ingrained arbitrary divide borne out of the Industrial Revolution, developed specifically to preserve a condition conceived of as “high” from dilution and corruption by new forces seen as “lower” - for instance mass-production and increased purchasing power. See how easy it is? I don’t even know what I wrote there - I just turned on my cultural theory babble mode. Obviously this writer’s switch has been stuck since 1960. Which would explain GQ’s attitude towards women.

(Yes I did just lambast GQ’s lack of incisive cultural critique. I must obviously be insanely highbrow. In fact my brows are so divorced from my eyes that a look of permanent incredulity frames my face. Like finding out that Zach Galifianakis’ beard is apparently lowbrow. And that I should care.)

My Imaginary Berlin

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 22:34:00 +0200

Berlin is now part of my imaginary landscape, joining Copenhagen, but not London, which once more becomes my home. And as much as I like Berlin, I must admit, that I occasionally prefer its imaginary, more malleable counterpart. An imaginary city is a thing of beauty, built on fragmented, diffused, sunny memories filtered through the prism of nostalgia. Like an old faded overexposed photograph. Yes, all my memories of Berlin are in Instagram, a visual condition that seems to affect an alarming number of Berlin residents, perhaps caused by their beloved skinny jeans that lead to poor circulation and, presumably, impaired colour vision. My imaginary Berlin contains a significantly smaller number of these self-appointed urban bohemians. They have either been brushed out or made more tolerable by nostalgia, the photoshop of memory. Bills, bureaucracy and other blemishes that could tarnish these recollections have been omitted. This is a Berlin without long cryptic dispatches from the health insurance, without icy slippery pavements that conceal frozen dog excrement and discarded cigarette butts. In my Berlin, it is always summer. In my Berlin I am never bored, never afflicted by existential ennui. I never mope or procrastinate. Youtube doesn’t exist. There are no videos of dancing budgies balancing precariously atop tennis balls.

This is my Berlin, the idealised version of a metropolis I once called my home. A whimsical version perhaps, but no less quixotic than the Berlin celebrated in the countless blogs, articles, travel guides, and assorted Instagram eulogies that populate Tumblr. Like one of those polaroids sold at Mauerpark, forever static, frozen in time, before it was tainted by Capitalism and dismantled by gentrification. The Berlin of counterculture, the postmodern capital par excellence, the forever changing yet permanently static cosmopolitan hub, where everywhere permutation paradoxically needs to be previously approved by the committee of urban desolation fetishists. This explains, perhaps, most members’s fascination with photography, as if constantly portraying the city with a Leica keeps the city safe in a pre-digital age. The only difference between their Berlin and mine is that theirs is mostly imagined whereas mine is hundred percent imaginary.

Imaginary cities have many benefits. They are blissfully free from those pesky people that have stridently different opinions and life goals, and insist in living in your beloved metropolis, despite you making it adamantly and constantly clear in your livestream that these philistines are diluting the city’s essence and making it less genuine. Yes, multiculturalism is an essential part of the urban experience, but bad taste is not a culture, and should be derided and despaired through the medium of Helvetica Neue! In imaginary (and imagined) cities everybody thinks like you.

Imaginary cities are also very cheap destinations, a major benefit in the current economic climate, particularly since I have become once more a student. They are also easily accessible from anywhere. This morning, for example, I spent a couple of hours in a sunny Berlin park downing beer when I should have been engaged in archival work in rainy London. In fact, there are days where I seem to invest more time bumbling round my mythological atlas than at my current location, a universe that contains unanswered emails, unfilled paperwork and unhelpful bureaucrats. You are welcome to join. In fact, to all those people in Berlin that made my stay so memorable, please do so. Our shared memories is what makes this Berlin, my imaginary Berlin, so special. Did I mention it is always summer?

And another book quote...

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:21:49 +0200

Once you decide to leave, you view a city through an entirely different lens. The simplest of actions, actions you have repeated one hundred, maybe a thousand, times swell in significance since each time may now be the last: the last time you buy bread at the bakery, the last time you ride on the U-Bahn Line 2, the last time you get your boots fixed at the cobbler, the last time you go to the newsagent’s for a travel pass or a pack of gum. There were so many things I would miss, I realised, even things I hadn’t seen in a while, like the stone-face museum guards from the days when I still went to museums and the scenester kids plowing through the flea markets in search of the holy vintage grail and the stern women from the bank and the post office with their eighties hairdos and the ice-cream place on Stargarder Straße, where there was always a line, even in winter, and that German punctuality, which made you miss your bus by seven seconds but also ensured you arrived at your appointments on time, and of course the voice of the S-Bahn announcer as he rolled off the stations and Alexanderplatz with its ever-changing face and the yellow streetcars, napping or in motion.

Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds

How to Speak and Write Postmodern

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:20:14 +0200

First, you need to remember that plainly expressed language is out of the question. It is too realist, modernist and obvious. Postmodern language requires that one uses play, parody and indeterminacy as critical techniques to point this out. Often this is quite a difficult requirement, so obscurity is a well-acknowledged substitute. For example, let’s imagine you want to say something like, “We should listen to the views of people outside of Western society in order to learn about the cultural biases that affect us.” This is honest but dull. Take the word “views.” Postmodernspeak would change that to “voices,” or better, “vocalities,” or even better, “multivocalities.” Add an adjective like “intertextual,” and you’re covered. “People outside” is also too plain. How about “postcolonial others”? To speak postmodern properly one must master a bevy of biases besides the familiar racism, sexism, ageism, etc. For example, phallogocentrism (male-centredness combined with rationalistic forms of binary logic).

Finally “affect us” sounds like plaid pajamas. Use more obscure verbs and phrases, like “mediate our identities.” So, the final statement should say, “We should listen to the intertextual multivocalities of postcolonial others outside of Western culture in order to learn about the phallogocentric biases that mediate our identities.” Now you’re talking postmodern!

Stephen Katz, How to Speak and Write Postmodern

Desperately Seeking Berlin

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 22:06:00 +0200

Spring has finally arrived in Berlin and the city’s veritable army of urban bohemians and perpetually-broke Mac owners have colonised terraces and parks, all airing their totally unique and identically cropped leather jackets. Individualism never looked so uniform. These very public displays of mainstream disaffection occasionally make me wonder whether I am the only Mitte resident under 30 that wasn’t drawn to Berlin by the capital’s irresistible counterculture magnet. I was not sitting in London one day feverishly trying to tell Helvetica apart from Helvetica Neue when my zeitgeist antenna registered the sweet siren calls of bohemia from across the continent. I ended up in Berlin by accident. The start-up my boyfriend toiled for got acquired by Nokia. Nokia, in Berlin. So we had one week to decide whether we wanted to up sticks and cross the Channel. Neither of us had been to Berlin before. Both of us liked the idea, and in particular the property prices. A month later I was ploughing my way through the inch thick snow that had accumulated overnight on Goltzstrasse completely oblivious to the counterculture cornucopia unfolding further up east. The only culture of cool I was aware of during our first fortnight in the German capital was the one located at the bottom of my thermometer. Ignorant as I was of the city’s ungentifried hotspots I picked Schöneberg for our hastily found temporary base partly because I vaguely remembered Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin taking place in the neighbourhood. So I guess I was following the hype, only my hype was 60 years old. And although we no longer live there, the area between Nollendorfplatz and Hauptraße occupies a cherished place in my personal atlas. I have many happy memories of exploring the shops occupying the Goltzstrasse/Akazienstrasse stretch as the permanently bewildered Ausländerin I still am; of Saturday mornings at Winterfeldplatz market inflicting my phrase book German on the potato seller, of trying to locate the final resting place of the Brothers Grimm at the Matthäus Kirchhof. I even ventured down to the Schöneberg Rathaus, backdrop for J.F. Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. It was a cold November night and I was standing in front of the illuminated building trying to feel the spirit of history but in the end I couldn’t feel my toes.

That was the time when I was still ingenue and my experience of the city was mainly shaped by Schöneberg, before I was alerted to the undiluted Berlin essence that was to be found in neighbouring multikulti Kreuzberg, in ungentrified Neukölln and in ostalgic Friedrichshain. Schöneberg it seemed, was less Berlin than other parts of Berlin. For all its eventful history and cultural heritage, the current dominant definition of Berlin, the one that has been rammed down my throat ever since, was surprisingly simple. I also think that it does the city a disfavour. Berlin is more than graffiti, techno, smokey bars and second-hand shops. It contains parts oblivious to Berlin’s status as the new New York. Whatever that means. Maybe they want higher rents after all. Berlin is not even allowed to be Berlin, and at the same time there seems to be a neurotic pursuit in tracking down the city’s essence. After all Berlin is a place in flux, an ever changing urban landscape, a metropolis condemned to forever become and never be. I wonder if Berlin has been engaged in this Sisyphean task of ‘never being’ for its entire 800 year history, before the advent of Lonely Planet travellers and urban fetishists. And for how long it remained static before it entered its current fluxy phase. As opposed to other European capitals, which are presumably entirely rigid and static. Which place worth visiting isn’t in flux? And what do they mean by flux? This is the postmodern dynamic urban fluidity that new Berliners will wax lyrical about to wide-eyed newcomers in a clandestine Neukölln bar. But is also the much maligned gentrification that new Berliners will fret about in a clandestine Neukölln bar while observing the incoming droves of wide-eyed newcomers. In these circles it is received wisdom that whilst urban flux was beneficial in the past, it must now stop. Just after their arrival. Any further newcomers dilute the essence of Berlin. A rather essentialist view for a city that celebrates its pluralism. Essence is what your travel guide promises. Lifestyle magazines might crown Berlin as the new art capital, and yet a large number of its inhabitants still think that Basquiat is what French people put baguettes in. Are these people not part of the real Berlin? The truth is that there is no essence, no existential anchor and in this way, at least, Berlin is fittingly postmodern. This search for the capital’s soul reveals more about the people seeking this holy grail than the city itself. It exposes them as newcomers and tourists. Nobody in their hometown frets so intensely about authenticity as when abroad. Then suddenly no restaurant is genuine enough unless it contains a toothless old matriarch busying herself over a stove with whom you communicate through the exclusive medium of hand gestures.

I do not want to extract you from your Lonely Planet universe (a very crowded place), but you won’t find such a lady in Berlin, metaphorically speaking or not. They have very good dentists in Germany. But you will find many people looking for her, so you can join the search party. You will even come across people that claim to have seen her before she disappeared, swallowed by the mainstream wave that’s threatening to make Berlin less authentic that it has been for the last 800 years. No wonder they can’t find the city’s essence. It is in the past.