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The entrance to my apartment building in Stockholm has a bulletin board. On it you will find a memo about the drying cabinets in the laundry room, an ad from a locksmith, one from a real estate agent, and then it has a small poster depicting a world painted in the American flag, subtitled En annan v‰rldsbild ‰r mˆjlig, "another conception of the world is possible" &mdash or, "another idea of how the world should be is possible." It's been there for at least a month, ever since I moved in.
I don't disagree with the literal message on this posterNov 3,2003: Clarification: What I mean is, it is trivially true that other conceptions of the world are possible; it is a non-normative statement., which is one reason why I think it fails as a piece of propaganda art. What is clear is that the person who posted it holds assumptions that do not bear closer scrutiny. Something compels me to list them.
1. The world is currently like that: It is not. American ideas hold very little sway in most parts of the world (Sweden being an obvious exception).
2. A world like that is undesirable: It is not. Attaining American levels of corruption, crime, due process of law, freedom of speech and democracy would be a huge improvement in the quality of life of an overwhelming majority of the world's population (Sweden again being an exception).
3. The American flag symbolizes American imperialism:Leave aside for a minute the absurd idea that the US is a cultural imperialist, forcing its films and fast food on unwilling victims. To indict the American flag — and the entirety of the American project it represents — on the grounds of Bush's foreign policy is like condemning the Swedish way of life on account of a profitable arms industry, or its neutrality during World War IIWere the poster in question to date from 1944, with not a letter changed, it would have done an admirable job rallying support against Nazism.. It is not unlike condemning all of Islam on account of its more radical strains.
Perhaps I resist the use of the American flag in the context of this poster because I do not think of the US as a nation state, of the same mold as European countries. Bash the French flag, and you bash France. Bash the Italian flag, and you bash Italy. But reproach the American flag and you cannot help but lash out against a whole lot more.
This is because — unlike nation states — America is not founded on a myth of common provenance, but on a myth of common arrival. And while we can never choose our provenance, we should certainly be able to choose our destiny. Many millions of immigrants have done just that, becoming Americans by sheer force of will. Try that in Germany. Or Denmark. America is not so much a country as a state of mind; a subscription to a set of parameters within which an inclusive democratic society would be built.
Spreading this meme — painting the globe with the American flag, if you will — is a worthwhile cause, as far as I am concerned. Of course, I completely disagree with the neo-cons on how to go about it.
Which still leaves me with that poster on my doorstep every morning. The concept of a free-speech zone in every hallway holds great appeal to me; it's a very American thing, really. It reminded me of this highly entertaining piece by Mike Adams, an American college professor who earlier this year documented his testing of the limits of tolerance of speech at his university. He turned his office door into a free speech zone, and allowed anyone to post anything on it, waiting to see who would be the first to fail the testIt was a feminist student who complained first; she objected to the sticker "So you're a feminist?... Isn't that cute"..
In that spirit, I've now made my own contribution to the bulletin board. On my way back from New York, I bought a 79c postcard of the Statue of Liberty and that poem by Emma Lazarus"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.". I put it up late last night. Oh, I know, it's corny, and I feel guilty for stooping to the challenge like that, but I no longer feel like I implicitly agree with the poster's sentiment every time I walk by it. And whoever put it there no longer assumes that I do.
Why oh why am I never allowed to see the Aurora Borealis? It's the solar storm of a lifetime up there, it was one of the main reasons for moving to Sweden, and now we have stupid clouds.
This is not the first time I've moved to a place for the astronomy. I pleaded with my parents to move to Australia in 1984 because Comet Halley was all set to make a splash in the southern hemisphere in 1986. (It proved worthwhile. And the southern sky is definitely more impressive than the northern offerings. Unless, of course, there are northern lights in them.)
There are a growing number of these around, but this is the first one made by a friend: noahjoaquin.com, a most excellent baby blog.
Yes, the idea is now being commercialized by babyblog.com but the site name indicates the entrepreneurs there don't appreciate how grand the idea can be: A blog for life, a present from the parents back to the child as it grows older, one to which the kid starts contributing drawings, then writings; eventually it becomes a group blog, a place for family holiday reports, or elegies to deceased pets. During the teenage years, it's a place for articulated selfabsorption — at college, for reporting back to the parents. Eventually, it's time to start a new baby blog.
I wonder what effect such a public platform for self-expression would have on children, especially if it is interactive, with positive feedback from grandparents and teachers. Kids must get as much out of it as we do, surely?
American and European dentists must really loathe each other's work. In the US, my dentist was agape at the coarseness of the European works in my mouth, and proceeded to finesse all manner of things in there. Today, I visited a Swedish dentist, and she was equally aghast, this time at the hurried look of American efforts.
So I need a recent American-made filling replaced. But first, a medical questionnaire. In Swedish. Rather than accidentally admitting to having sold off a kidney, I leave most of that blank"Snussar du?" is one question. Do you use snuss, a teabag of tobacco you stuff between your gums and your upper lip, making you look like an out-of-whack Don Corleone? It doesn't get more Swedish than this. I've tried it, and as the buzz builds up, you begin oozing brown drool whenever you smile. Apparently, it takes practice. Whoever makes it should really expand into New York City bars, though..
My Swedish dental vocabulary is about as good as my dentist's English dental vocabulary. As I lie there, open mouthed, with an 800,000 rpm diamond drill in my mouth an inch from my brain, she proceeds to rattle off all manner of Important Dentistry Observations in Swedish, to which I nod earnestly, incapable really of asking for vocabulary clarifications. I get an irrepressible flashback of that Gary Larson cartoon where a dog owner tells off his pet but all the dog understands is "blah blah blah GINGER blah blah blah." Yeah, I'm the dog.
I'll find out next week if I agreed to having all my teeth pulled and getting dentures. I hope not.
I've been sent an English translation of an official body-by-body investigationStrangely, the English translation is more detailed than the Swedish original conducted earlier this year into Sweden's murder rate for 2002. The conclusion: "A total of 95 persons fell victim to incidents of lethal violence in Sweden in 2002." For a population of 8.94 million at the end of 2002, that makes for a homicide rate of 1.07 per 100,000 people per year. Not 10 per 100,000, as The Economist reported, and lower than Japan's rate of 1.10 per 100,000 in 2002.
The Economist used old Interpol data for 2001PDF thanks to Jan Haugland, which has since been "corrected". The old Interpol data showed 892 murders in 2001 and a suspiciously exact rate of 10.01 per 100,000Could it have been a data entry error?; new data shows 167 murders that year, with a concomitant murder rate of 1.87 per 100,000. Interpol has not yet published 2002 data for Sweden.
That's quite an improvement. But putting both PDFs — old and new — side by side raises many questions. The new data is clearly wrong when it comes to counting totals. Both PDFs count the total number of crimes committed in 2001 to be exactly 1,189,393. But the new data is now missing 622,232 instances of theft reported in the old data. In the new data, the total for category 4, all thefts, is lower than some of its subtotals! The old data also doesn't add up, but not so flagrantly. What a mess.
Meanwhile, the Swedish report accounts for an overreporting of murders of around 60% over the last decade:
This would reconcile Interpol's own new rate of 1.87 in 2001, based on Swedish police statistics (red line), with the lower total of around 1.10 in 2002, based on a counting of actual bodies (blue line).
What we're seeing, then, is a compounding of two errors. Interpol's bizzare error, and then a systemic overreporting of murders in Sweden's own police statistics.
From the chart it is clear that the divergence between the two lines becomes much larger starting in 1992. That's when the police implemented a computerized case tracking system that was intended to solve cases, not give accurate crime figures, but from which statistics were culled nonetheless.
The result is overcounting. For example, murders committed abroad but reported in Sweden were counted. Conspiracies to commit murder that were not consumated but discovered were counted. Attempted murders were counted. Suspected murders that later proved to be accidents or suicides were counted. False murder reports were counted. Some murders were counted repeatedly:
One example of this phenomenon may be found in a case where there were two victims, but which was recorded as involving three victims; and where, in addition, the offence report was completed twice. This means that a total of six offences were registered, of which only two were correct. Furthermore, the two offences actually involved had been committed several years earlier.
Here is the breakdown in numbers:
Quite a cautionary tale, then. But it's probably too late to combat the frisson of excitement that coursed through the conservative web when The Economist's chart unwittingly endorsed Interpol's error. A typical reaction, from the conservative American news site NewsMax:
Sweden, supposedly the land of granola-munching socialist peaceniks, had 10 murders for every 100,000 people. Yes, Sweden is branching out and is no longer just Suicide Central.Maybe Stockholm will take a cue from our Second Amendment and allow its citizens the right to defend themselves from its out-of-control population of greasy-haired blond killers.
The moral: How nebulous statistics can be, and also how dangerous it can be to draw conclusions from improperly vetted data.
I already know how my next post will begin:
The bus from Newark discharged its passengers — a ... of Swedes and myself — into the halogen murk of the Port Authority bus station on 42nd.
But now I'm stuck. I can't think of a good collective noun for Swedes. This is what I've come up with so far, but rejected. What do you thinkI have, however, found an excellent collective noun for my fellow city dwellers: A syndrome of Stockholmers.?
A binge of Swedes? (Doesn't cover the sober ones);
A curiosity of Swedes? (Doesn't cover the drunk ones);
A share of Swedes? (Too Third Way. Or too First Way? In any case, too confusing);
An angst of Swedes? (Too stereotyped);
A collective of Swedes? (Too literal for my tastes).
Any suggestions?
Who among my friends gets to win photography competitions?
Franzi, that's who! (She's now a Leica richer.) The photo is of Olivier and Gulzada on the roof of 233 E 4th street during one of those interminable late summer days in the latter half of the 90s. You can see more pictures by Franzi here. And pictures of Franzi here.
Why do book reviews have to be so damn descriptive? All too often, one need only choose between reading the book or reading the review, because the latter's retelling of the plot makes for a perfectly adept Cliffs notes of the former. This complaint applies also to typical film reviews by the arbiters of upper mainstream taste, in the NYT or WSJ. Felix is prone to plot exegeses too, in a blog no less, where he could leave the tedious recounting to IMDB and focus instead on opining, but he insists on retelling plots because he is in fact auditioning for gigs writing such formulaic fare. Well, that's my suspicion, in any case. Good writing his may be (plodding at times, perhaps in need of a few memorable phrases, but honest), though blogging it is notWhere else to put this? Felix and I bet a bottle of vintage Veuve Cliquot on Sunday in NYC over the number of countries that originally joined EMU. I said 12. Felix said 11. What's the point of doing these wagers if they are secret, I ask you?.
Or else, book reviews barely touch upon the book they are meant to review. The reviewer might relegate the ostensible raison d'etre of the article to a mention of the book in a paragraph or three, or in the footnotes, appended to a 5,000 word rant he has been chomping at the bit to see in print but has been too lazy to research rigorously.
As I flicked through the last issue of The New York Review of Books at Felix and Michelle's this past weekend in New York, and found articles of both persuasions, I imagined the eventual point of this post would be to lament book reviews that aren't. Then, on my way back to the airport on Tuesday, I picked up the current edition, billed the 40th Anniversary IssueThe entire contents are online! Download everything while you can and read at your leisure, if you can't buy.. I did not know then that its pages deliver a torrent of stunningly good pieces, or I would not then have mentally marked for blogging a tirade against bogus anniversaries. Fortieth anniversary? What makes for an anniversary worth celebrating these days? Years that are multiples of 10, or 25, or maybe 5? There are, for instance, far too many 35th anniversaries, often procured by a committee too drained of original ideas to think of anything but marking the fact their institution has limped along a further 5 years.
And to what extent is a millenial anniversary any more worthwile or instructive than an anniversary marking 1003 years? None that I can fathom, save for the satisfaction of seeing similar digits aligned prettily. And why use years at all? Why not celebrate 10,000 days a few months after one's 27th birthday? One thousand months shortly after 83? Okay, maybe I'll concede years are handier, but why certain multiples are more conducive to feasting baffles me.
But I've decided such invective would be misplaced here, for in fact any excuse that can produce such a crackling good read as the current issue will do.
An inventory of what I've read so far:
Luc Sante writes as if he had been commissioned preÎmtively to debunk the main thesis of the New York Times Magazine a few weeks back: That everything old is new again in New YorkMy own visit this past weekend confirmed the ludicrousness of the NYT's conceit that today's New York is much like 70s New York; I was a kid in 70s New York and so have a good baseline for comparison.. But Sante's piece is so much more — it's a declaration of love for a city that has moved on, and it's a sharp description of life in the East Village in the early 80s, a perfect companion to Please Kill Me.
Joan Didion writes a serious yet hilarious review of those rapture novels, where all good Christians go to heaven, leaving us atheists, agnostics and Muslims to implement a UN world government, a single global currency, and Satan as our leader. She then segues into an exposition of how the assumptions underpinning these books are familiar turf for a president who sees himself as doing God's work on earth, or at least acts as if he does.
And where else but in TNYRoBs can an academic pissing match about the nature of Jesus that's been dormant since April (when I blogged it) resume so effortlessly?
Eminem's lyrics are dissected by Andrew O'Hagan — a real service, as I never catch lyrics — to underpin the argument that the bond between Eminem and his audience is a lot more ironic that the Tipper Gores give him credit for.
There is so much more worth reading: Pieces on Cesare Pavese, Paul Krugman, Garrison Keilor, George Orwell (yet again)... I've only just begun.
Which is a good thing — I will have to feast on its contents until the next issue hits Stockholm, delayed (where, at customs?) by the usual few weeks. The one I hold in my hands certainly won't be seen in Stockholm coffeeshops this side of November. Maybe I should rent it out.
So much to blog, so little battery... I've just finished Pompeii by Robert HarrisFlightblog I is here. I had noticed it last weekend at the head of bestseller lists in Dublin bookshops after having heard good things about it, so had to snap it up. It's a breezy read, but with bizarre mannerisms that make it fall far short of Robert Graves's gold standard, or even Gore Vidal's excellent effort.
It's a pity that there aren't more Roman historical novels ó I blame this in part on Graves, whose I, Claudius is such a daunting masterpiece that subsequent efforts are doomed to lower the genre's average quality, or so I imagine writers might figure.
This book follows Attilius, a young aquarius in charge of the aqueduct feeding Pompeii, in the days leading up to the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. His aqueduct runs dry, so he sets out on a repair mission that takes him through Pompeii and onto the slopes of Vesuvius, just as that mountain prepares to blow its top.
Harris's descriptions of the technical feat that was the Roman aqueduct system are the best parts of the novel, though the singlemost impressive factoid is found in a prefatory note excerpted from Roman Aqueducts & Water Supply by a certain A. Trevor Hodge:
How can we withhold our respect from a water system that, in the first century AD, supplied the city of Rome with substantially more water than was supplied in 1985 to New York City?
To which the only possible comment is: Filthy New Yorkers, bathe alreadyI can hardly believe this factoid, and would have checked online but for the fact SAS has no inflight wireless broadband. SAS does, however, have the coolest in-flight entertainment system. It includes two live feeds, one from a camera aimed ahead and one aimed below, as well as video games, though sadly not yet arcade games that use the live video feeds as a component of the game, or I'd be carpet bombing Canada right now. Other possible creative uses: extra scary last moments as the plane careens into the ground.!
Vesuvius is Harris's excuse to delve into vulcanology, though here the premise is sometimes a little forced, as when our protagonist is made to climb the summit even as everybody else flees for their life, alert to the mountain's warnings. An incredulous bystander asks "why?":
A good question. Because the answer to what has been happening down here must lie up there. Because it's my job to keep the water running. because I am afraid.
Nah. I would have run.
My main problem with the book, though, is a curious literary affliction whereby Harris is compelled to use contemporary slang and terminology that is clearly anachronistic. I'm not demanding the book be written in Latin, just that characters refrain from exclaiming in German ("Ach," he spat, "get out of my way, both of you.") or speak in pidgin English ("Not safe money here. Money hidden. Plenty money. Some place clever. Nobody find. He said. Nobody.").
Venturing onto less certain ground, I found myself pausing over mentions of traffic noise, of people eating at snack bars, and of buildings made from concrete (a word invented in 1656 AD). He uses words like malarkey (1929) and coiffeured (1907, and what's that e doing there?), which bring me violently forward into the modern age, frustrating my efforts to willingly suspend disbelief and imaginatively recreate Pompeii's final days.
But maybe that's just me. I will not yield, however, on the matter of referring to Pliny the Elder as an "old solider". Yes, solider is a great Scrabble phony bingo, but there exists an anagram that perhaps describes the old admiral more aptly.
Nor can I let pass the following:
"what's so funny about that?" demanded Pomponianus. "It's not so funny as the idea that the world is flying through space ó which, if I may say so, Pliny, rather begs the question of why we don't fall off."
Are we really at a point in the English language where writers of bestsellers are allowed to perpetuate misuse of the term begging the question with impunity? Are the language barbarians well and truly inside the gates? Ach!
I've been having far too much fun for the past half hour listening to the Muppets' Swedish Chef over and over again. It's on a newly launched site by the Swedish Institute called Young Swedes, and it's bizarrely addictive.
Swedish chefs also feature on the parent site, Sweden.se, Sweden's official "portal" on the web. This whole web presence is a huge branding exercise for Sweden, but the amount of information provided in the process is a bit staggering. If you have a term paper due tomorrow and haven't started yet, you could do a lot worse than plagiarizing this site.
It's fascinating how Swedes perceive themselves in the world, and then how they go about presenting themselves to the world.
Ryanair is taking its philosophy to the logical extreme. I saw the future of air travel on my way to Ireland for the weekend and it is cramped. Ryanair's brand new Boeing 737-800 plane, in service for just a month and the vanguard of their new fleet, sports some interesting "innovations:" Gone is the little pouch in front of you that was stuffed with crash instructions, magazine and barf bagPrevious watches: Here, here, and — obliquely — here.. Instead, the space is now taken up with your knee. The space between the back of your seat and the one in front has been shrunk to exactly the length of a human femur bone. Luckily, the seats no longer recline, so you are in no danger of being bashed in the head by the shiny yellow plastic seatback in front, upon which crash instructions are now afixed in the form of a sticker that takes up most of your field of vision for the duration of your flight. The lack of a barf bag is elegantly rendered moot by upholstering the seats in a dark blue wipeable plastic material.
There are still trays that can be prised from their locked, upright position, though the little plastic thing that holds them up no longer has a hook for a jacket, as my neighbour spent most of the flight figuring out. But these trays waste valuable space too, especially if they go unused for an entire flight. I will write Ryanair and suggest they start using feeding bags. They work fine for horses, and can double as barf bags. Perhaps the oxygen masks, which I've never seen used, could be refitted to deliver liquid nutrients. And on a flight from Stansted to Dublin, do we really need toilets? The bus from Victoria Station to the airport didn't have any, and that trip took much longer. The bus didn't have cabin crew either. How about having ground staff give the crash course instead of doing it on the plane? What about selling us feeding bags before we embark? And when is the last time you saw two bus drivers sitting up front? Plenty of room for improvement. Literally.
A few days ago I partook in a half-day consulting workshop with my colleagues at work. Several important fundamentals about branding and positioning were Powerpointed out to us; I was made familiar with mÂlgrupper (target groups), huvudbudskapet (the main message) and kanaler (channels). The entire session did wonders to my Swedish, and I even articulated my own opinioner about why webbloggar are a great kanal to get our huvudbudskap to the savvier mÂlgrupper out there.
If only they had kept the whole thing in Swedish. For some reason I cannot fathom, the consultants ó a company specializing in something called brand-focused differentiation strategies ó decided to title their presentation "Dare to Differ!" I was tempted to differ there and then about the suitability of using that slogan in a marketing situation, unless of course you want to argue with your customers.
As the projected slogan illuminated a darkened conference room, my mind wandered to one of my favorite scenes in Woody Allen's Zelig, where a newly cured Leonard Zelig ends up in fisticuffs with a visiting psychiatrist because he has become too adamant in his opinions. Sort of like the newly minted MemeFirst, actually.
I'm sure that is not what the consultants had in mind. They probably thought their slogan was a clever little riff on Apple's Think Different campaign. But "differ" is an ambiguous word. I can mean to be different or to vary ("these specifications differ from the norm"), but when agents with free wills are the subject of the verb, to differ implies disagreement. It is usually a subtle shift in emphasis, but in 360-point all-caps on a monday morning it is not.
I'm now off to London to give Eurof a dressing down for his most recent comment.
I'm in a New York state of mind tonight, missing the city. I was put there by an article by Gary Shteyngart in the New York Times magazine; not so much an article really as an autobiography told through a succession of New York storiesGoogling Shteyngart takes me straight to a piece in Slate where he drools over ToquÈ's foie gras! I once flew to Montreal for dinner there (on the occasion of Felix's birthday) and it remains one of the standout dinners of my life. Strange, I thought I blogged it, but of course this was in the year 2 BB (before blog). It certainly would have been a bloggable event.. Which brought back my own New York stories. I need to write those down sometime, eventhough I suspect late nineties NYC is going to be the next early nineties Prague.
I'm not sure what to make of Shteyngart's assertion that NYC is regaining its old desperate grittiness. Read LES blogs and you hear of nothing but an accelerating schedule of hotel and bistro openings. A recent vicious rumor had 7B colonized by khaki-wearing upper east siders. I need to check New York's pulse, and will do so when Guy and Sue get married there in a few weeks time. I'll report back here.
A comment left on this site a few days ago led me to the contributor's blog, where I discovered an odd disclaimer: "In accordance with Swedish law I must inform you of cookies," it begins. Impossible, I thought. Fear of cookies is so 1998. Surely no technologically savvy government, having read their primer on cookiesNo, really, read the primer., could possibly come up with a law so overbearing, given the target. But I was wrong. As of July this year, Swedish websites using cookies have to tell visitors this is the case. In addition, they have to explain to visitors how to turn off cookies in their browsers. Being out of the country, I completely missed this. Two bloggers noticed (that I found), but nobody made a fuss, and — now that I look for it — Swedish websites that use cookies do indeed carry warnings not entirely different in tone to those on cigarette packs in the US.
First off, I object to this law on esthetic grounds. How dare anyone tell me what text I should display on my website, thus ruining its clean, sparse linesI don't use cookies at the moment, but I could well be if I were using one of many popular website traffic meters, and I am seriously considering doing so without telling you about it. In fact, maybe I just lied about my site's cookie usage.. But more importantly, the internet is a public space, and in public places, you should expect to have your actions recorded as a unique but anonymous user. Next time you go to Stockholm's NK department store, you will be observed by security cameras. Will anyone bother to ask you if that's okay? I don't think so.
The Swedish royal family agrees with me: Visit their official website and you'll get two juicy, warning-free cookies deposited on your hard drive The cookies are called IntraComUserID and JSESSIONID.. Swedes with reluctant cookie warnings on their site are invited to jettison them and join their sovereign in his revolt.
The view from my office is straight into the upper stories of Stockholm's Royal palace, across the street. Nobody ever seems to be home, but the guards don't let on. Today, in the courtyard behind the palace, the marching band assembled in a light drizzle and played some standards while I skirted some tourists on my way to lunch. Just before the band was out of earshot, a jolt of recognition: Super Trouper, by ABBA, in all its brassy splendor. Per. Fect.
