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Amazing how not writing for a week tongue-ties my three typing fingers. You can take the preceding sentence as evidence of that. At least there is behind-the-scenes progress on the blog redesign front. Just you wait — BLOG@STEFANGEENS.COM will soon the best-designed blog you've ever seen. Jason Kottke will be shamed back to the drawing board with his transitional XHTML; 456 Berea Street will never dare slide another door again; SimpleBits will go green with envy before you switch its sylesheet, and Tomas Jogin will give up blogging outright.
If the CSS references above stump you, you're in luck. But since I've had CSS, XML and other TLAs sloshing around in my skull for the last week or so, let me just quickly put my musings down while they're still fresh.
About Jason's redesign: He's on target. As you can see from the current designs of this blog and MemeFirstBut please don't look behind the curtains of my site just yet. It's a mess back there., I agree completely that boxes = bad. It's the classic trap of doing something because new technology allows it. Having black text swimming in whitespace just like in a book is not a failure of the imagination; it is not an inability to embrace the possibilities of a new medium; rather, it is a recognition that over the centuries, printers have honed in on the most efficient means of passing information from the page to the mind. Sure, magazines will play with labor-intensive one-off design extravanganzas for the same reason peacock feathers exist, but for workaday reading — the daily habit — I want my text clean and sparse, and not upstaged by design flourishes that look good at first blush but soon thereafter proceed from cute to haggard. The less often you update a design, the more Lutheran it should beThat's be a good name for a design bureau, come to think of it: Lutheran..
The thing I like least about SimpleBits is that option to change the color of the banner. Other than showing that this is possible, it serves no purpose. It certainly does not enhance my user experience. Color is also used frivolously on another noted recent redesign — that of Stopdesign. Each page gets a completely different color scheme. It's too much; and it suggests indecisionWhy not have sitewide theme changes once every season instead?. Both SimpleBits and Stopdesign are the personal pages of possibly the most proficient web designers out there right now, and so they might feel compelled to crank it up — again, the peacock feather effect — but I do wish Stopdesign's Douglas Bowman had taken a page out of his Blogger redesign and kept it simpleOne final parting observation: I don't like three equally spaced columns, as Stopdesign now sports on some pages. The overabundance of symmetry jars, and I'm not given a sufficiently large clue as to where I should start exploring the page..
Oh, sorry, this was meant to be a post about the state of the Swedish blogosphere. I'll try to keep it short from here on in.
Over the past few months, the Swedish blog scene has grown, and the result is that we now find ourselves at the cusp of the third great epoch of Swedish blogging, and there are some good English-language specimens to point out.
Generalizing now: The first epoch was characterized by a predominance of technologists and early adopters, as was the case everywhere else. They mainly blogged about technology and self-referentially about blogging, but this was a good thing, because it helped mature the technology sufficiently for the onset of the second epochI blogged the second epoch here.: The rise of the journal-ists, who embraced the ease of the blog medium and used it as a tool for personal writing on topics that mostly had nothing to do with technology.
And now, in the past six months, we've seen single-issue pro blogs come of age in Sweden. Some of these are predominantly in English: JKL Blog, for example, is group authored by a Swedish strategic communications firm. Media Culpa is penned by a Swedish PR professional. And pro-globalization writer Johan Norberg has been blogging for a just over a year nowSome Swedish language-only media/politics pro bloggers: Gudmundson, Erixon, Lindqvist Arrue., so he was a little ahead of the curve. We're still waiting on the emergence of a Swedish Gawker or Andrew Sullivan, but to be fair, getting paid to blog in a language other than English sounds somewhat of a tall order right now. There just isn't a critical mass yet of Swedish blog readers who aren't also blog authors.
Finally, want to remember what web publishing was like circa 1997, before blogging? Take a look at The Local, an English-language news site about Sweden that launched three months ago: Once a week, it publishes a new issue with a roundup of the week's stories in the Swedish media, translated and given a contextual spin.
What's frustrating about The Local is that the publishers position the content right for their intended audienceThey have a good English-language overview of the Knutby trial, for example., but steadfastly ignore every lesson learned about web publishing over the past 7 years. Publishing "issues" is what web sites did before they realized this was a scarcity induced habit in the print world that has no justification on the web. Not publishing articles on the web as soon as they are ready means news is staler than it should be, for no reason.
Instead, if The Local were to adopt an irregular publishing schedule dictated by the availability of news, this would mean readers tend to visit more often, which means more impressive numbers to show advertisers — which The Local says it is trying to attract. And what's with the reliance on email as a publishing tool? You can even get "bulk subscriptions" via email (?). Email is completely passČ as a one-to-many communications technology — RSS syndication is the way to go on that front. Basically, this website needs to become a blog ASAP. When it does, I suspect it will become successful.
The seventh in an occasional series.
Ten: Predatory seating
Nine: Culinary relativism
Eight: PreÎmptive planning
Seven: Premature mastication
Six: Irrational discalceation
Five: Radiotjnst i Kiruna AB
Four: Temporal engineering
It's the longest day of the year, I've got front-row seats at Mosebacke terrace for a glorious slo-mo sunset that's been turning Stockholm orange for hours, hot air balloons are wafting past a crescent moon, and I have the audacity to write about something I hate here.
Well, I have to. I'm writing a series about things I hate, not love, about Stockholm. To be honest, I was running out of subject matter, but that was before it was brought to my attention just last week that Midsommar — the summer solstice and Sweden's most treasured day — is not on June 21 this year, but instead has been decreed to occur on June 26, because, well, it makes for a more convenient three-day holiday.
This is quite shocking. Latter-day druids everywhere are dancing around menhirs at this very moment; huge man-made structures in Latin America are perfectly aligned with the sun at great cost to previous generations; people in the Antarctic are suffering right now for this cause; and it is the one day that keeps Swedes going between November and March — but if nature has the gall to have the longest day happen on a day other than Saturday, Swedes reschedule it like it's a dentist appointment.
How is this different from celebrating Christmas on December 27 — because the presents are cheaper? Cinco de Mayo on nuevo de Mayo? New Year's on January 3? Would you mind? I thought so.
Last year, my first Midsommar did fall on a Saturday, so I was not then apprised of this cavalier attitude Swedes have towards the natural rhythms of nature. But I should have known better: Over the past 18 months, I've repeatedly butted against another example of this predilection for ruthless temporal engineering: The week-based calendar.
In my first Stockholm apartment, the hallway was swept by tenants according to a rotation posted on the communal bulletin board: Next to my name, it said "V.40-48-3-11..." Swedish readers already know what this means, but I had to ask a neighbor, who told me that it was my turn to clean on the 40th week of the year, on the 48th, och s vidare. And when might that be? "Look it up."
Instead I guessed, and clearly wrongly, as everytime I thought it was my turn somebody else cleaned ahead of me that week. Nobody said anything, though. Maybe they were embarrassed about their calendar, and with good reason, as I have just had to delve into its fiendish machinations for the sake of this post. It is emphatically Napoleonic in its arbitrary rigidity: You'd think week 1 is always the week the new year starts on. You'd think wrong — In 2004, week 1 starts on Dec 29, 2003; in 2005, week 1 starts Jan 3, 2005. 2004 has 53 weeks, 2005 52. I'm surprised anyone cleans at all.
At a work-related meeting last week, I was asked if I would be in Stockholm during the 33rd week. "What, do I look pregnant to you?" is the retort I stopped myself from using, instead asking for a translation into western dates.
Maybe the adoption of the week as a calendaring tool was the gateway to all this insouciance regarding Midsommar: After all, it's not as if the holiday is being moved out of week 26, so what's the fuss?
If you haven't yet read parts one through three, you can read all four parts chronologically here. In fact, it's a good refresher for everyone, as the first post dates back to almost a year ago.
I've been meaning to deliver the letter to Margaretha, but for a variety of reasons the opportunity did not present itself until earlier this week, when she and her daughter and I agreed to meet at Tranan after workI was early so I spent half an hour in Stockholm's public library and its remarkable reading room, designed by the renowned Swedish modernist Erik Gunnar Asplund..
I sat myself at a table, ordered a glass of wine and waited, somewhat nervously, with the letter in my bag. I was on the lookout for a woman in her early fifties accompanied by her daughter. Margaretha arrived alone, however, and as neither of us knew each other, there was some hesitation before we ventured to introduce ourselves.
Within minutes, it was clear we were going to get along wonderfully (in Swedish). She is engaging and witty, and I realized I lucked out with my letter delivery. Monika, her journalist daughter, soon joined us. They share the same gestures and flash the same smile. It's obvious they are close.
I produce the letter. Margaretha produces photo albums from 1970. She's even managed to unearth a photograph of the letter's author, Bengt M—, courtesy of a move in the last few months
. Here he is doing his military service, from the exact period they were going out. From her photo album, here is a picture of Margaretha doing her studenten, a high school graduation ritual, a month or two before the letter in question was written:
And then, over the course of an hour or so, she fills in the details. When Margaretha graduated, she was was going out with Bengt, who was doing his military service. That summer, she moved to Stockholm to study while working at the central bank. For a few months she stayed at student housing at the address to which Bengt addressed the letter.
Within weeks of arriving in Stockholm, however, she had met and was dating Rolf, who also worked at the bank. Bengt was not aware of this when he wrote the letter, in which he mentions visiting her in Stockholm in the coming days. He did visit, and she broke up with him then. Margaretha winces a little when telling this part. Apparently, Bengt asked her why she couldn't just have phoned him the bad news, thus saving him the trip. A debate ensues with her daughter about what the etiquette is for breaking up in such circumstances. Bengt didn't get angry, however, just disappointed, Margaretha says. He was gentle and kind.
She met Bengt one more time, during the Christmas holidays later in 1970, when things were still a bit awkward, and they lost touch after that. The group of friends they had in common also drifted apart over the years, though most of them still live in the same area in southern Sweden.
Margaretha married Rolf, the man she broke up with Bengt for; they've had two children and lived in Luxembourg and Gothenburg before settling in Stockholm. It turns out that when I called, the children were under the impression their dad was her first love. But how many of us know the details of our parents' pre-marital love lives? I certainly don't, and it will stay that way unless somebody calls me with news of a long-lost love letter addressed to my mother from somebody patently not my father.
After I called and Margaretha saw the letter online, she looked for Bengt M— online, found him living in the area where they grew up and called him. He remembered her without prompting. In brief: He is a construction engineer and recently divorced. This summer, Monika is travelling to southern Sweden, and she says she will try to meet up with Bengt, so he can tell his side of the story. When she reports back, you'll read about it here.
Then, it was time for photo ops:
Note the lovely Swedish summer weather.
As to what this letter was doing on a ledge on St. Marks Place — that mystery remainsMargaretha and Monika, if parts of your story got lost in translation, need clarification or if you want to add anything, please go right ahead.. I don't think we'll ever uncover its trajectory, from student housing in Stockholm in 1970 to the sidewalks of New York in 1999.
— They are going to get that Swedish chef someday.
— Who is?
— The Smorgasbord of Health.
For 20 minutes of guaranteed ruined productivity, click here.
This is an exception to the two-week no posting promise. I promise.In this week's Prairie Home Companion [RealAudio], a truly standout edition, including:
@ 01:25:30: A tribute by Garrison Keillor to Ray Charles: A wonderful monologue followed by a lovely rendition of "Hallelujah I Love Her So".
@ 01:34:54: One of the best "The News from Lake Wobegon"s in years — a bittersweet remembrance of drinking and smoking days long gone that meanders towards a country song about Richard Nixon and ends with strident political commentary on current affairs. Hilarious and yet quite moving.
The whole show is worth listening to. It was recorded in Ocean Grove, an old Methodist settlement on the Jersey Shore that I once managed to visit with Anna and her Betty, a white 1984 Cadillac Coupe Deville that was then disintegrating gracefullyLater that summer, Anna and Anna manged to drive her all the way to Texas before she perished completely.. We were on a pilgrimage of sorts to Asbury Park, just up the shore, where Bruce Springsteen first played gigs at the now legendary Stone Pony, right by the ocean at the end of a dilapidated parking lot. Anna had spent many a teenaged Swedish winter locked in her closet listening to Bruce, so this trip had a very special meaning to her.
In Asbury Park, we learned that Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes, old pals of Bruce, were playing at the Stone Pony that evening, so we went and listened for a while, but it was getting late and so we left before the end of the show. The next day, the papers screamed how Bruce Springsteen had joined Johnny onstage in a surprise ending, only the second time in 25 years Bruce had played at the Stone Pony. Anna was sick to her stomach. It ruined her summer. She has not listened to Bruce Springsteen since.
I'm now going to cash in two weeks out of the six annually I have just alotted myself as vacation from long-form blogging on stefangeens.com. When I return, I expect the site to have been redesigned, because site design to me is a bit like gardening — hands-on but aesthetically pleasing in prearticulate ways — and that is exactly the change I need"Whatever information aesthetics conveys is prearticulate — the connotation of the color and shapes of letters, not the meanings of the words they form. Aesthetics conjures meaning in a subliminal, associational way, as our direct sensory experience reminds us of something that is absent, a memory or an idea. Those associations may be universal, the way Disney's big-eyed animals play on the innate human attraction to babies. Or they may change from person to person, place to place, moment to moment." Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style..
I've also been thinking about making changes to the kind of content I post. I've figured out the short essay format now, so I was toying with the idea of forbidding it — all English-language prose, actually — as an allowable form for future postings here. Since blogging should be a learning experience, I figured, I should allow myself to write only in Swedish, Dutch, French, and in English rhyming couplets.
I soon realized that not even I would want to read such a blog, so that would probably be taking things too far. Still, I like the idea of a blog aiming to minimize its readership as a means of staying true to itself, and to that end I think I will write more quirkily in the future, and lie on occassion, and blur fact and fiction when it suits me. I think that writing to the expectations of a readership can increase visits in the short term at the expense of what the author feels might be most important, just like a political party that gravitates towards the center in a bid at popularity loses its soul in the process. So consider this realignment an attempt to avert the fate of Sweden's Folkpartiet.
Quirkiness? Minimizing readership? Here is an example of what I mean: Over the next few weeks I want to read/reread the following books: Lee Smolin's Three Roads to Quantum Gravity; Gdel's Proof; a very well-reviewed book (available free in its entirety online) on the Riemann Hypothesis; and the relevant bits about Rule 30 in Wolfram's A New Kind of Science (available online free as well). The reason? I need all four to explore the idea that there is no randomness, after all, at the quantum level in the universe, but that things are strictly determininistic, the result of unfathomably many simple processes leading to complex states for which there is no precise description shorter than actually running the universe from scratch — hence the ability of scientific equations to describe aggregate properties of systems but not predict exact statesEarlier posts about this stuff:
"Time is Discrete"
My Rule 30 Flash app. Is there something akin to Rule 30 dictating interactions between the smallest possible units of space-time, churning out complexity in the form of particles? Is that the Theory of Everything? I need to repolish my tools for understanding at least a bastardized version of such a possible ToE if and when it is discovered in my lifetime.
From an amazing online tutorial on the distribution of prime numbers.What do Riemann and Gdel have to do with this? For me, prime numbers represent a basic graininess in mathematics — The Riemann zeta function approximates their distribution, but cannot predict precisely when they occur, in my mind providing an analogy to how rule 30 might create grainy results at the quantum level that equations can only approximate in the aggregate. Meanwhile, Gdel mapped — using prime numbers — statements about numbers to statements about logic, and showed that just as there will always be new (prime) numbers that are not the product of smaller numbers, there will always be new truthful logical statements that are not provable using more basic axioms. (At least that's my current layman's understanding of his proof, but I may be off, and hence the need of a reread.) If an eventual Smolin/Makropoulou-Kalamara ToE posits the universe is a huge distributed computer, then Gdel's work, dealing as it does with number patterns, would be directly applicable! It would be a beautiful way of showing how our universe's logic and the basic quantum structure of space-time are inseparable, one the corollary of the other.
During the next few weeks, I will still be blogging away at MemeFirst. Meanwhile, also, check out Anthony Lane's love letter to Ingmar Bergman in The New Yorker, on the occasion of a Bergman retrospective at the Film Forum in New York. It sounds like he actually flew to Stockholm a few weeks ago just to get in the mood:
The weekend before your first Bergman movie, take a flight to Stockholm and, once there, a ferry out to the islands. This will not be hard, the capital itself being composed of fourteen islands, and the archipelago to the east offering twenty-four thousand more. Nowhere in Europe can you quit civilization and find yourself in wilderness with such speed, and that transition alone is a key to the dreams of escape in early Bergman, and to his later nightmares about what we may discover in our isolation. Think of Monika and her beau, the camera pitching slightly on the prow of their boat as it chugs through the city and out into open water; think of the two women, the silent patient and her chattering nurse, who hole up on a stony isle in ěPersonaî; think, finally, of Bergman, who has based himself since 1966 on that same hideaway, FÂr, a hundred miles south of Stockholm, and who chose it, two years later, as the site of ěHour of the Wolfî and of his coruscating war film ěShame.î Thanks to jet lag, you will have a chance to follow the arc of a Swedish summer evening. All the passages in Bergman, you will realize, where the characters are too hazy and restive, and the heavens too bright, for any hope of repose are not just fanciful conceits or loaded metaphors. They are weather reports, and when the girl in ěSummer Interludeî recalls, ěThere was no time to sleep,î she is referring not only to endless sex, fine proposition though that is, but to the sacramental whiteness of the nights.Bergman's evocations of Swedish summers have clearly been the catalyst for many a foreigner's fantasies about Sweden, not least Lane's. To see what he means, catch Summer with Monika if you can.
I think there is an interesting realignment underway in the Swedish party political system. Parties, and even factions within parties, are no longer just positioning themselves along the traditional left-right axis, but also in terms of how global their perspectives are — along a nationalist-internationalist axis, if you will. The result is some interesting similarities in outlooks between parties not traditionally neighbors on the left-right axisJohan Norberg, when trying to choose how to vote on June 13, is in effect weighing which party is the most internationalist among the center-right offerings. (He has no permalinkage: scroll to June 7.), and, more worryingly, opportunities for nationalist parties to conquer terrain on the opinion landscape that is being vacated by larger political parties, whose elites are (albeit slowly) migrating towards global perspectives for policymaking.
This migration may explain the surge in violence on June 6 [Swedish] in Gamla Stan between what looked like the extreme left and the militant right. In fact, the altercation is better understood as a battle between extreme internationalists and disenfranchised nationalists.
While the left-right axis, roughly, aligns parties according to class loyalties or income redistribution preferences, the nationalist-internationalist axis aligns parties according to the scope of these allegiances. Is it just Swedish farmers whose interests a party should represent, or those of farmers in the rest of Europe or even the third world? Should the workers of Sweden unite, or the workers of Sweden, Poland, the Baltics, and the rest of the world? Where you fall on such questions makes huge differences in policy recommendations, even among people of the same left-right persuasionBoth Gudmundson [Swedish] and Norberg (June 8) link to this just released Timbro report on voting records of MEPs, and while individual voting records vary, among Swedish parties the Social Democrats have the best free trade record. (!).
It used to be very simple, and in many countries it still is: Parties should represent the interests of their voters, and these voters may be left, center or conservative, but they are all, say, French. The resultant political system is one where, ideally, utility is maximized for the greatest number of Frenchmen, without regard for such niggling externalities like policy induced poverty abroad Yes, I'm talking about CAP again, my apologies. or the needs of political refugees from from abroad.
For parties migrating to an internationalist perspective, this is no longer an ethically defensible position. If the value of non-citizens' lives is the same as that of citizens, then an ethical party policy position should try to maximize utility for all "ideological brethren," regardless of where they may live. Defending the rights of unionized labor at home by denying opportunities for fellow working-class members across the Baltic Sea (through restricted immigration, say) becomes problematic.
It appears to me that among Sweden's left-of-center parties, youth wings are the ones keener to adopt this internationalist approach, whereas the party apparats, older and with more union baggage, are resistingCould the pro-free trade voting record of Social Democrat MEPs be explained by their relative youth? Unfortunately, the Timbro report does not have MEP's ages. It would make for an interesting correlation study.. The old guard may also be more pragmatic, electorally: Patronage gets you elected, whether you like it or not, but with it come expectations that have nothing to do with ideological consistency. They may also understand that the electorate is not nearly as inclined to adopt a global perspective on utility maximization: This SvD article [Swedish] from a few days ago reports that a rising trend of Swedes, now over half, want Sweden to take in political refugees at a lower rate than is currently the case.
The irony of this entire situation is that in many cases parties are faced with a false dilemma. With respect to trade, for example, free traders know that their prescription for trade policy leads to the greatest possible utility for both the importing country and the exporting country. Unfortunately, the theory of comparative advantage is one university course removed from being self-evident, and it is in this gap that nationalist protectionists set up camp.
These "napros" do have potential natural allies: While the total utility of a country improves when it embraces solidly pro-globalization policies, individual groups within the country may lose out — auto workers in the US, for example, or farmers in Sweden. These groups, some of them traditionally heavily unionized, are the easiest targets for napros, and nationalist parties will try to coopt their interests. Gudmundson has already nailed one such example: the nationalist SverigeDemokraterna and their Swedish-meat-only-in-schools policy. My guess is that this wins votes with farmers because they empathise far more with fellow Swedes than with fellow subsistence farmers in Senegal.
An example of nationalist protectionism on the left is the reprehensible poster campaign by the Byggnads contruction workers' union a few months back. Their members are also waiting to be captured by a nationalist party.
What are the policy implications of a migration by traditional parties towards global perspectives for policy making? There are lessons to be learned from Flemish politics: In an effort to contain the nationalist Vlaams Blok, all other parties threw up a cordon sanitaire, in effect voluntarily vacating the entire nationalist half of the opinion landscape, and leaving it all to the Vlaams Blok. The result: one third of the vote in Antwerp now goes to Vlaams Blok.
I don't think, however, that the solution is to remain nationalist in perspective, but that preÎmptive policies should be introduced which prevent the nationalist option from becoming appealing. In Sweden, concretely, this means redirecting union umbrella group LO's funding, massively, towards retraining those groups at risk of losing their livelihood because of globalization. Whatever happens, a nationalist party should not capture groups like Byggnads union members. Also, let's not forget the average age of the black-T-shirts I saw milling around on the edge of Slussen on June 6: They looked barely out of high school. These people need to get a job in a job-producing economy so they have no time to blame their failures on somebody else.
Stockholm is perfectly positioned to see the transit of venus across the face of the sun, currently underway, but a stubborn cloud cover is obliterating every hint of the event. In fact, the weather's been remarkably crappy here for all of May and June.
We don't have to wait too long for the next transit, which takes place on June 6, 2012, but for which Stockholm is not well positioned (I'm sure the weather will be great, as a result). Japan and Australia will be the place to be.
Jvla vdret! Venus stannar infr solen fr frsta gÂng i 122 Âr och det regnar i Stockholm. Flest av de webcasts fungerar inte, eller inte r live, eller har fr mÂnga beskare, men hr finns en som gÂr: Centro de ObservaÁo AstronŰmica no Algarve har en bild som uppdateras.
≈tminstone behver vi inte vnta 122 Âr till. Nsta Venuspassage r 6 juni, 2012, men skall inte ses frÂn Sverige; bara frÂn Australien eller Japan. Drfr kan jag gra vrldens bsta long-range vderprognos: Det ska vara solig i Stockholm 6 juni, 2012kl 11.45: Sol i Stockholm! Och jag har sett passagen. Anvnda 2 svarta diapositiv och du ocks fÂr titta p solen. Venus r liten, frresten.. Man kan planera nstnsta bloggpicnic utan bekymmer.
PS. Venuspassagen finns tills kl 13.22 i Stockholm, ifall vdret blir bttre.
If I can stop laughing long enough I would like to offer Swedes who read this an apology on behalf of us Belgians for an item of junk mail that likely appeared in their mailboxes this past week disguised as electoral information for the Sverigedemokraterna, the country's minuscule anti-immigrant party.
Update 2004-06-06: Here is the PDF of the pamphlet.I opened it, of course, eager to see what they thought of a foreigner like myself, only to find a Belgian staring back at me, above the fold of the leaflet, bemoaning "how Sweden's political leaders are subjecting Swedes to racism and discrimination [by foreigners, apparently]."
What a bizarre thing to say, I thought, and what a bizarre person to be saying it. For what possible reason could he be on that pamphlet? My curiosity irked, I googled his name, Bernard Mengal, suspecting he was some Vlaams Blok party member being loaned out in the cause of pan-European xenophobia.
The truth is a lot weirder. Bernard Mengal is a rich property scion from Brussels and a militant pagan. He actually bankrolled this pamphlet, money which the Sverigedemokraterna accepted without asking too many difficult questions (or doing a google search, apparently) late last year. The only condition: His face had to appear on the publication. This obviously provided an interesting challenge to the pamphlet designers: How does one make the mug of an incongruous Belgian look like a perfectly reasonable thing to put on Swedish nationalist propaganda? (He looks just like that infamous pagan bard Cacofonix, don't you think?)
Soon enough, it was brought to the party's attention that they were aligning themselves with a nutcase. One party luminary, Tommy Funebo, quit after making the eminently reasonable point that a party defending solid Swedish Lutheran principles should not find a friend in someone still siding with the Vikings against the Christianization of ScandinaviaHere is Mengal's historical treatise, The Christian offensive against the Scandinavians, alas only in French.. Seeing Christians as freeloading newcomers in Europe takes xenophobia to a whole new level, though at least you can't fault Mengal's impeccable internal logic.
Mengal's name, not surprisingly, shows up in this antisemitism watch, practically by default:
[Neo-pagan Groups:] ... The Association des Successeurs des Ases (ASA), known as the Fils des Ases, for example, has been active since 1992. Based in Brussels this small group which seeks to defend the ěNordic race,î evolved from neo-Nazi groups of the New Right. Recently, publications ascribed to the ASA or to its spokesman, Bernard Mengal, have unmistakably endorsed a shift toward armed combat against the establishment. Mengal was also the initiator of works based on biological racism and an obsessive antisemitism. The main contributor to Mengalís publications is the Frenchman Pierre Chassard. Together, from June 1998 onwards, they issued the journal Contre-ThËses.Sverigedemokraterna's leadership says [PDF] it took a good look at the available evidence, two issues of Contre-ThËses provided by Mangel himself, and that while he may be weird, he is not anti-democratic or anti-semitic. (Funebo, who saw those same issues, came to the exact opposite conclusion.) But the most hilarious defence of their actions is this paragraph:
Even the Vlaams Blok leadership was consulted, and they had never heard of Bernard Mengal and could not give us any more detailed information. From this one can conclude that Bernard Mengal is not a well-known person in Belgian politics, and cannot therefore be a renowned antisemite or extremist.ven ledningen i Vlaams Blok har konsulterats, men de hade knappt hrt talas om Bernard Mengal och kunde inte ge oss nÂgot mer detaljerat omdme. Av det kan man dock sluta sig till att Bernard Mengal inte r nÂgon knd person i belgisk politik, och kan drfr omjligt vara en knd antisemit eller extremist.The inevitable conclusion being that the Sverigedemokraterna think it perfectly reasonable to take money from antisemites or extremists as long that they are not well known. Which, in the end, is what they did.
But the Sverigedemokraterna might now be feeling a bit embarrassed by the whole affair. Mengal's name is impossible hard to find on their EU election site (except for in the above PDF press release), nor does he feature on the newest version of the pamphlet. Or maybe they just used up all his money.
I slutet av min tid i New York brukade jag kpa ett kaffe att ta med frÂn CafČ Pick-me-up, stta mig med min dator i Tompkins Square park och surfa via donerad trÂdls bredband frÂn grannar.
Jag har inte nnu kunnat gra samma sak hr in Stockholm. Det r inte s viktigt i 8 av 12 mÂnader, men just nu skulle det vara hrligt att kunna skriva eller kolla e-post i solen p eftermiddagen.
Knner ni till cafČer i Stockholm som har trÂdls bredband? Var man kan sitta ute i timmar med en brbar dator? Eller parker dr det finns ett ppet wi-fi ntverk? Jag vill inte frilansa hemma nr vdret r s fint ute. Tack i frvg!
While walking up the stairs after my run today I thought I might write boastfully here about my first sub-hour circumnavigation of Sdermalm, and how I did it solo, without a wheezing bouncing Joachim by my side, after he broke an agreement to come running with me, citing prior children.
But taunting Joachim like that would not be nice, so I won't, though I fear you might be disappointed by what then remains of my post: sage descriptions of jogging Swedes that crossed my path in droves as I squinted into the late evening sunlight, a segue into how healthy Swedes are; how, more generally, duktig they are in everything they do. I'd then have to explain the word duktig to you, and recount how Emma once said there is no accurate English equivalent. It does not merely mean "good, able, capable;" there is an element of relentless self-improvement implied by its use; it is an inner initiative to learn from mistakes that makes Swedes duktigIKEA pitches in with an illustrated example of the word duktig.. At least all those who are not slarvig.
Or I might try to recount the thought processes of an hour-long run, how fragments of a rather good short story I had read just previously came back at odd moments, but I'd just embellish it, and maybe even make stuff up, like for example how some people can look like they are running fast when they are not, and vice versa — I just thought of that now. In any case, such writing would come across as earnest, and we hate that.
Perhaps I should just start a new genre where I do not actually write a blog but just describe imagined blog entries that I have not written. Noncommittal writing, I would call it, and I would engage in it in the more transient phases of my life, when nothing is really certain or cherished notions are in a state of flux, when writing down thoughts would give them more permanence than they deserve, like putting shacks up on the World Heritage List. And there is something wonderfully Calvinoesque or Borgesian to it all. Maybe I should just post reviews of my imagined rants, pronounce them the work of genius, but report back inexpertly and confused, and depend instead on the imagination of readers to construct something of proper greatness out of them.
In my continuing mission to infiltrate the Swedish psyche I managed to finagle my way into a proper Swedish student ball over the weekend. By proper, I mean tails for the boys, ballroom dresses for the girls, white gloves, dinner speeches, toasts, snaps, drinking songs, punsch, a 12-piece orchestra, ballroom dancing, and then, at 2.30 am, as the glow of morning twilight began brightening the proceedings, an ABBA medley.
It's all beginning to make glorious sense.
Favorite drinking song of the evening: A subversive rendition of The Internationale, which now goes like this:
More snaps in the glas,
more glasses on the table.
More tables at the party,
more parties on this earth.
More earths around the moon,
more moons around Mars.
More marching to SkÂne (the region),
more SkÂne (the snaps) God bless
bless bless.Mera brnnvin i glasen,
mera glas pÂvÂrt bord.
Mera bord p kalasen,
mer kalas p vÂr jord.
Mera jordar kring mÂnen,
mera mÂnar kring Mars.
Mera marscher till SkÂne,
mera SkÂne gud bevars,
bevars bevars.
I mangled it con molto gusto.
For longtime followers of this site, the ball also provided an opportunity to lay to rest vicious recurring rumors that Steffanie and I are one and the same person. The visual evidence is presented on her site.
