the goggles do nothing

Today in Staffan Fridell’s Runology class we spent most of our time on the 24-character Elder Fuþark, which was in use from about AD 100 to 700 to transcribe sounds in either North Germanic or, arguably, Northwest Germanic. (This distinction centers on exactly when the language in Scandinavia began to diverge from that in present-day Germany, Holland and England.)

As for origins, most scholars attribute a Classical source for the original idea to write down language with these particular characters. Latin, Greek, Etruscan and others have been proposed as the alphabet which inspired the first rune-carver, but the consensus now is that that Latin was probably the primary, and arguably only, source. Many believe that the origination of runes was due to one prime mover — that their invention was because of one individual who decided to effect this innovation, rather than a conscious effort on the part of a group or collective. That runes then spread so widely so quickly is testament to the compelling nature of written communication, even in such a primitive form.

There are a few problems involved in the transliteration of letters from the Runic to the Latin alphabet. One is that we believe Proto-Norse (North Germanic) to have had two distinct “r” sounds, one that is similar to ours today and one that was quite different: a palatal r sound transcribed as either [z] or [R], depending on whether one is working with runological or phonological texts. Another difference in professional practice between Runology and Phonology is the former’s tendency to use the rune- derived [þ] instead of the greek [θ] symbol for the dental fricative.

Runes were given name according to the acrophonic principle: the glyphs had names that began with the sound of the rune itself. There were two exceptions to this principle: *ingwaz and *algiz, because neither the [ŋ] nor the [z] sound could be used to begin a word.

The Elder Fuþark was the foundation for two later innovations: the 28-character Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet, and the 16-character Younger Fuþark which developed in Scandinavia during the 700s.

The father of Danish deconstruction on the left's nature-worship:

På et ikke nærmere bestemt tidspunkt blev de røde grønne; socialismen udskiftede klassebegrebet med naturbegrebet. Det gjorde den ikke af kærlighed til skove, tudser, sæler og søer, men for selv at overleve i det risikomoderne uden sit analytiske begreb. Og naturen er lettere at overbevise og styre end arbejderklassen. Den strejker ikke. På venstrefløjen er økologi et middel. Ikke til at bevare naturen, men nationen og til at forsinke og fordreje markedskræfterne med. Selve ordet "økologi" stammer som bekendt fra en nazist (E. Haeckel).

At some time in the past the Reds became Green; socialism replaced the concept of class with the concept of nature. It didn't do this out of love for forests, toads, seals and lakes, but instead in order to survive in the condition of risk-modernism without its analytical notions. And nature is easier to persuade than the working class. It doesn't strike. For the left wing, ecology is a means to an end. Not to protect nature, but nation, and to delay and distort market forces with. The word "ecology" itself, as we know, comes from a Nazi (E. Haeckel).

Post-Danmark: Politik og æstetik hinsides det nationale, p.36

I linked to the Teaser Trailer a few months ago; here's the full-length version of the promo for the new Swedish movie:

This was postpended to an invite request from someone on LinkedIn, a social networking site with a focus on professional and corporate connections:

Fact: More people have joined LinkedIn than live in Sweden

Is that some kind of vague threat? Or a prediction for the future? It's hard to believe that an affiliative lifestyle choice like creating a profile on LinkedIn is in anyway comparable to being born in northern Europe...

The Gringo-spinoff Macho, previously an insert in various daily papers, has now decided to become an independent magazine.

In my last week in Denmark I'm writing two final papers, one for Tue Nexø's Comp Lit class on Welfare State Literature and one for Erik Skyum's class on Short Story Theory. The latter is being written in Swedish, and I can say two things: 1) It's shocking how hard it is to keep the two languages straight, after having spent the last five months immersed in Danish, and 2) it's humbling how many errors in Swedish that Danes can discover when they proof-read your text. Flight is Friday back to the States, after which a end-of-quarter party with the UW grad students is planned. Next week the Apple Developer's Conference in San Francisco.

There's a teaser trailer online for the film adaptation of Khemiri's Ett öga rött:

Today the Danish students' association had a visit from the poet and critic Mette Moestrup, who gave a presentation on the contemporary American poet Juliana Spahr, formerly of U. Hawaii and now at Mills College in Oakland. Moestrup has been involved with Spahr in previous projects, including translating an article of hers into Danish for publication in Den Blå Port, as well as an event that brought American poets to Copenhagen. Spahr's latest poetic work, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, which is probably best placed in the "Hawaiian poetry about 9/11" genre, was what Moestrup read from and discussed with us today.

Reaction from the students focused on the issues of engagement versus passivity that seemed to emerge in Spahr's poetry -- the work makes constant reference to media overload and a stream of disturbing images on the TV in the run-up to the war in Iraq, while remaining strangely silent about political participation in the democratic process. One gets the sense the geographic isolation of Hawaii contributes to the sense of disconnectedness that Spahr's poetic narrator feels, though of course paradoxically the poems are all about being connected to events in the larger world. Hawaii's dual role as island escape and naval military base is also interesting to Spahr, though not really in any kind of complex or new way that I can divine.

The other striking thing about the poems is their creation of a kind of ersatz second-person-plural pronoun, normally morphologically undistinguished in English, in "yous". The group was about to ascribe this affectation to a cutesy way of referring to the poet's collection of multiple parrots, when somebody in the group pointed out that it was probably more a reflection her polyamorous lifestyle. Somehow I liked the poems more with the image of parrots in my head.

All in all Mette Moestrup made a stronger impression on me than the poems that she brought to share with us, as it's refreshing and inspiring to see authors from smaller European countries stay up-to-date and current with other authors in the world. There certainly isn't a counter-example of this kind of engagement that I can think of in the USA, with the possible exception of those authors whose mastery of Spanish allows them to engage with Latin American artists.

Niels Frank, formerly the head of the Danish Author School, has just compiled all his essays on Modernism into a volume called Alt andet er løgn (Everything Else is a Lie). The title, a reference to a letter from Stéphane Mallarmé to Henri Cazalis, means "Everything Else is a Lie." Frank's project is to try and rescue Danish Modernism (with a capital M) from the shadow of Swedish and other European Modernisms, against which it seems to pale. Johannes V. Jensen and Villy Sørensen are, naturally, the key authors here. He gave a talk at Literaturhaus with Pia Tafdrup and Erik Skyum-Nielsen tonight.

Niels Frank is a fan -- a real big fan -- of the American poet Frank O'Hara, and he read aloud a poem by O'Hara that he had translated. I can now safely say that I know more about "The Day Lady Died" in Danish than I do in English.

Lars Bukhdahl, writing in Weekendavisen, gave the book a generally good review, though he did flay Frank for not offering more of his own analysis and engagement with the texts, in place of merely citing American criticism. In addition, he thought Frank should have made mention of young, living Danish authors, such as Jeppe Brixvold (author of the new novel Forbrydelse og fremgang) and Lone Hørslev, whose connection with the Forfatterskole should have placed them on Frank's radar.

Brixvold himself was in the audience, though his own main point of critique was that Frank's jump between 1950s and '60s High Modernism and contemporary American "language poetry" wasn't a bit of a stretch -- that there seemed to be a chunk missing that would link the two together.

The Local, a great English-language site for those living in Sweden, has produced a word-for-word translation of all the placenames on the Stockholm subway map.

From Shout Stone (Ropsten) to Dalecarlian Heath (Masmo), all the words you never think about except as station names are here. (Though some might quibble with the translations -- Östermalm should probably be Eastern Ore rather than Eastern Bronze.)