February 2008 Archives

Jon Viklund, a doctoral student at Uppsala, gave a presentation today about typography and visual design in Swedish Modernist poetry between 1905-1920. The poetry book as artwork paralleled the development of the prose contained therein, with the resulting volumes achieving a status as collectors' objects. These included such works as August Strindberg's 1905 poetry collection Ordalek och småkonst, which was designed and illustrated by Arthur Sjögren. Sjögren, whose work is seen in the photos above from other collections, was a master of Art Nouveau illustration and typographic design. His name stands on the facing title page of Strindberg's Ordalek och småkonst, perhaps the first time that a graphic designer achieved such recognition within the Swedish literary tradition.

Lund historian Gunnar Broberg presented a talk today on the various ways that Carl von Linné organized human beings into categories. Though Linné's ideas are often thought of as setting the groundwork for the pseudo-scientific racism of the 19th century, Broberg notes that it's difficult to recognize cultural imperialism in Linné's system of classification.

Homo sapiens, the thinking human, was not an innate characteristic but rather a state to be attained through effort and accomplishment. Set against this classification were a variety of mythical and imagined alternate orders, including Homo ferus (children raised by wolves), Homo nocturnus (those who walked at night) and Homo troglodytes. Though he did indeed divide humanity up into Africanus, Americanus, Asiaticus, Europeanus, and Monstrosus, his ascription of the Four Humours to the first four of this quintet was motivated by the typical 18th-century desire for order and pattern: if there were four continents, then surely they must map neatly onto the Four Humours.

Linné himself was somewhat of a critic of the European, going to so far as to place the Native American near the top of the hierarchy of humanity. This was of course in line with the conception of the Indian as the 'noble savage,' but what is more interesting is Linné's absolute hatred for the civilized European fop, the Frenchified dandy which in his eyes represented the decadent nadir of his own continent. As Broberg notes, in the 18th century it was fashionable to hate the fashionable.

Though generally pretty sturdy, Apple's MacBook line suffers from a slight design flaw that results in the front-facing edge of the case developing cracks and eventually losing small splinters of black or white plastic. This happens because of the pressure that users' wrists exert on the top of the case, below the keyboard. The outer edge of the top case plate, about 2mm, is much thinner than the surrounding material and is prone to cracking:

This is basically an æsthetic, rather than structural, problem. Nevertheless, there's an entire Flickr Group dedicated to the problem. The consensus seems to be that Apple will replace this part of the case if your laptop is under warranty (or AppleCare.) But for those of us whose computers are beyond the 1-year time limit, there's another option: replace the top case plate yourself.

Anne Mattsson and Ann-Sofie Lönngren, two Ph.D. students at Uppsala, prepare to discuss homoeroticism in 18th- & 19th-century literature in a seminar sponsored by the Literature Students Association.

Facebook introduced some new features last week for their "Pages," which are online entities that typically represent a brand or consumer product. I wrote a few weeks ago about the difference between the new Pages and the older Groups. These new changes extend Pages towards the community-generated-content model of Groups, while still preserving the unique advantages of the Page model. Here are the changes in brief:

1) All new Pages have user-uploaded photos turned on by default. Owners of legacy pages have to enable this new feature manually.

2) Logo images can now be either Flash or FBML (a subset of HTML used in Facebook applications.) For most Page owners, this translates in to being able to embed a small Flash logo or scrolling ticker with news items or photos.

3) Page owners can now ban younger members from visiting if the Page represents a bar or alcohol product.

4) Movable Mini-Feed. I hadn't even noticed this, but apparently the list of recent activity used to be fixed, and is now adjustable to any position on the page.

Of these four changes, the most important is probably #1, the ability of "Fans" to add their own pictures to Pages. This brings Pages closer to the more freeform, community feeling of Groups, and is probably a recognition on the behalf of Facebook that more and more people are setting up Pages when they previously would have set up groups. As I mentioned in my previous post, Groups can't have Applications embedded in them, which makes the addition of RSS feeds and other interactivity very difficult. I know of two organizations that have switched from Groups to Pages just for this ability to add in syndicated content feeds from their existing, extra-Facebook publishing efforts. Now that Pages can reflect more user-generated content in the form of Fan-uploaded photos, there are all the more reasons to go with a Page instead of a Group.

Saturday I attended Cecilia Lindhé’s defense of her thesis Visuella vändningar. Bild och estetik i Kerstin Ekmans romankonst. (Visual Turns: Image and Asthetic in Kerstin Ekman’s Novels.) Anders Ohlsson from Lund University was the opponent, and interestingly enough Kerstin Ekman herself turned up for the proceedings, as this unbelievably blurry picture attests:

Lindhé’s interest is in what she terms the intermediality of the Swedish novelist’s work, specifically the connections to visual culture in books such as En stad av ljus and Gör mig levande igen. Both Bachtin and WJT Mitchell’s theories of metafiction and imagery, respectively, come into play in her analysis.

An interesting linguistic nuance is that Swedish lacks the distinction that English has between picture and image, with the former more concrete and the latter more abstract. In Swedish, bild serves both purposes, meaning Lindhé has to be careful to specify when she discusses visual imagery in Ekman.

There’s a video recording available online of Lindhé presenting at Umeå’s digital humanities center for those interested in her work on intermediality in Ekman.

Sitting between Ebba Witt-Brattström and Stefan Helgesson during dinner was not quite what I would have planned for Valentine's Day, but so it goes. The former, a professor of literature from Södertorn, was in Uppsala to talk about Dekadensens kön, a book about the Swedish poet Ola Larsson and the Baltic-German playwright Laura Marholm.

As a married couple, Ola's work spread into German-speaking countries through his wife's translations while Laura herself laid the groundwork for the model of the "new woman" which would later characterize both Swedish feminism (Ellen Key) as well as literary production (Edith Södergran: "Jag följer ingen lag. Jag är lag i mig själv.") Witt-Brattström concentrated on the gender aspects of fin-de-siècle Europe: her claims is that unlike most other periods in history, when women were modeled on men, during Decadence men became a kind of subordinate creature to women, with the intricate, horrifying and supernatural face of Medusa that adorns the cover of Witt-Brattström's book providing an overpowering, and decidedly feminine, model.

Helgesson's book, Efter västerlandet, I found useful when writing my Master's Thesis, so it was a treat to get to sit next to him at the following dinner and chat face-to-face. He's one of the few people who have published seriously on Alejandro Wenger as far as I know.

This weekend I went on a return trip to Bergen, on the west coast of Norway. I was last there in November 2007, as part of a conference in Migration and Ethnic Relations.

Every trip to Bergen has to include a visit to the Fish Market, which is sort of like the scene of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre for undersea life:

At the Bergenhus Fortress, you can see Håkon's Hall, a 13th-century royal building constructed by (who else?) Håkon Håkonsson.

Like any good medieval building, it's been destroyed and rebuilt any number of times, from catastrophic fires right after the initial construction to the most recent disaster, a Dutch munitions ship exploding in the harbor in 1944, setting the entire complex alight. Thusly the interior is mostly reconstructed, albeit on the model of authentic surviving models further north.

The lower floors, underneath the main hall, feature dramatic architectural vaulting:

The big tourist attraction in the city is the collection of Hanseatic buildings seen at the top of this post -- Bryggen, the Warf. Though these have also continuously been rebuilt through the ages, and though the fronts of the buildings themselves are mainly filled with touristy shops...

...the reconstruction itself has taken place with traditional materials and methods, and seen from the back the complex appears like a window into time:

On Sunday a bank of fog rolled into the bay, covering the buildings in a soft blanket of light grey:

More pictures from Bergen