I balanse

KE and I fell back in step this week. I actually think it helped just to acknowledge openly how far apart we are on some issues (relating to our interpersonal communication and expectations about our life together). Certainly the theme for the rest of our week has been how much we have in common and how much we really enjoy each other as people. We just had a fabulously interesting conversation that managed to encompass some of my thoughts about the Peer Gynt book and KE's thoughts about becoming an art teacher. The conversation was so good that I had to take notes afterwards! So, yay for us, we really are a good couple after all, despite driving each other crazy at times.

I got to spend today at home writing. I managed four pages (about 1000 words): two additional pages for the theoretical introduction and two pages' worth of additions to chapters four and five. In the introduction I'm trying to write about "cultural appropriation" and adaptation. I can really feel the project coming together (despite lots of holes and problem areas), which is just so darned exciting. It's a good sign (or not, depending on how you look at it and why you read this blog) when my work is more interesting and fun than my knitting!

To artikler

Earlier this year I submitted two articles to the main American scholarly journal in my field. One of them, the Frobenius article, had been rejected by a Norwegian journal previously, the other, the one on children's novels by Aanrud and M. Hamsun, was "fresh" as it were. I've just heard back on the second one, and I'm gobsmacked: both have been accepted for publication without revisions. Anyone who is a professional academic knows that only vary rarely do things get accepted without a laundry list of revisions suggested by the two anonymous peer reviewers that read each manuscript. Often times the two reviewers have vastly different visions of what needs to be changed, and sometimes one recommends rejection while the second thinks the work is brilliant. It can be a maddening process. It usually means a long and difficult round of revision. It can be really hard (not to mention demoralizing and even humiliating) to change fundamental things about the analysis that one has worked so hard to construct, and sometimes the reviewer comments can be mean spirited and petty.

I am so incredibly relieved to have had not one but two pieces of recent work make it through the process intact. For one thing, it means a lot less work for me, but beyond that it means that my work appears to be viewed as of very high quality, and that feels fantastic. I think a lot of the credit has to go to my friend L, who critiqued both drafts before I sent them out. She always has good insights and asks all the right questions that challenge me on all the right issues.

We're struggling (as usual?) here at home. Had a tough discussion with KE last night. Sometimes it feels like we just don't understand each other at all. E is doing fine, but I think he caught a cold on Halloween. He went to his friend S's house for a party and for trick-or-treating, and somehow he managed to go out without a coat. I would have never let that happen. Last night he was froggy so I'm preparing myself for staying home with him today if need be.

Kulturstudier

Today was the day I set aside to flounder around looking for a theoretical model for my Peer Gynt book. It started out really bad, but I think I caught a glimpse of where I need to take things by the end of the day, so I have to count myself satisfied. I've been thinking of this as a cultural studies project, but I really haven't done any reading in recent cultural studies research or theory in a long time. I had spent some time in the library on Tuesday looking for stuff on consumer and tourist culture, plus some art history stuff (the most well known probably being Hal Foster's The Return of the Real). I had skimmed over the big stack of books I brought back with me, and had actually intended to stay home to read today.

E got me up at four o'clock in the morning with a bed wetting episode (yay new washer and dryer! It was so much easier to deal with than it used to be), however, and since I couldn't fall back asleep I started reading, and I didn't like what I saw. I could just tell that none of what I had brought home was going to work for the project, so after taking E to school I went in to my office. I did a bunch of poking around on databases, and what seemed to work the best was to go to the "best" journal in the subject area (Cultural Studies--the only one at level two in the Norwegian ranking system) and do searches in their archive for relevant terms. Bingo! I downloaded eight articles, and two of them have my research radar going "zing!" A scholar named Lawrence Grossberg has come up with an approach to Cultural Studies that builds on the philosophy developed by Deleuze and Guattari. This branch of Cultural Studies is being labeled "Spatial Materialism" and it combines all the things I love: the non-transcendental (or "monist"--a new word for me--basically a rejection of dualism) philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, a focus on space/place questions, and a concern with cultural production of all kinds, including popular culture and stuff we don't even think of as "culture." If I weren't so outrageously tired I would try to explain it some, but my head is about to hit the keyboard out of sheer exhaustion, so I won't even try.

The only other thing I wanted to add before I crash was that I finally got around to asking an IT person to install Zotero on my computer at work. He came late in the day today, so I got about a half hour of playing around with it in before I had to go home. That's some incredibly clever "reference management software" there! I think this may really change the way I work for the better. It will be especially useful in that I'm writing two books that are going to have some bibliographic overlap, and also because it will make it a lot easier to switch between citation styles. The weird thing, though: Zotero works in Firefox. I had received a message last year from the UiO IT folks saying we couldn't use Firefox any more because of security issues. When I brought that up to the guy who came to set up Zotero, he said he'd never heard of that happening, and that Firefox is what they recommend. D'oh. Further evidence of the inscrutability of UiO IT support, I suppose.

Picked up the tickets for Trolljegeren for tomorrow night...

Fotspor

I made slippers! They started out like this:

This is some of the yarn I harvested from a thrift store sweater. The color is accurate here, but since winter is fast approaching, it was too dark this afternoon to take a decent picture of the finished project, but I'll slap it up here anyway, even though the color is totally wrong:

Ta-dah! Totally magic that strips of garter stitch turn into something so three dimensional. And they fit me perfectly. Only problem is that they were made for E! I'm already working on a downsized version for him out of left over gray yarn. My mom wants a pair too, so I have lots of excuses to knit really easy garter stitch pieces over the next week or so. Yay!

This week I decided to get serious about the theory that will support the Peer Gynt book. I've basically just been jotting down anything and everything I can think of about the context and works that I'm examining, but I'm now at the point where I need a theoretical model to reign it all in. I grabbed a ton of stuff at the library. Once I've digested it all, I'll try to sum it up here. But I was distracted from working on it all today for three reasons: first, I decided at the last minute to submit my conference paper from IASS this summer to their online proceedings volume. I had been hesitant because I didn't think it would count toward the Norwegian system of publication bean counting, but the editors have assured me that it will. That was enough incentive for me to spent the three hours it took today to revise it slightly and change the citation formatting from MLA to some kind of wacky Swedish-Chicago Style hybrid. 90% of those three hours was spend on the formatting. Then there was a lunch talk over at ILOS about the journal Norsk litteraturvitenskapelig tidsskrift, which was interesting enough. And then I had to race to put together tomorrow's lecture on Hedda Gabler. I'm still not done with that, so I'm banking on a two hour stint before classes tomorrow. That's playing it really close, so I hope the lecture isn't a disaster.

Speaking of disasters, here's what I'm really excited about this week, Trolljegeren:



Yay, a scary Norwegian monster movie! Much crunching of jeeps under the feet of trolls! And as far as I've been able to tell it's a total spoof. Can't wait. I'm going to see it on opening night together with L, who is a little skeptical about monster movies, but basically up for everything. KE was a little disappointed I wasn't taking him! But if I really like it I'll probably end up writing about it, which means I'll need to see it again... I really shouldn't get my hopes up though. There are more than enough bad Norwegian movies (that inexplicably get rave reviews) to go around.

Date-kveld

Last night KE and I had a date night, for the first time in about a year. E spent the night at his aunt's house and we went out for dinner at one of the few local restaurants here on Nesodden. It turned out to be a real treat. Generally I hate going out to eat at restaurants in Norway because I usually think the food  tastes bad and it is so expensive, but this place was actually worth eating at! Last month the only restaurant within walking distance of our house changed from a more traditional pub menu to an all-Thai menu. Thai food is my absolute favorite. I'm of the mind that if you're going to pay someone else to make you food, it should at least be something better than you could make at home, and preferably much more exotic. This place had better Thai food than either of the two restaurants I've tried in Oslo, and actually better than the disappointing restaurant we tried near our hotel in San Francisco when we were there on vacation. I can't believe my luck, though it probably won't last since restaurants have a terrible time keeping afloat out here where we live.

We had borrowed a couple of movies at the library, and decided to try Mona Hoel's Salto, salmiakk og kaffe (2003) when we got home. Argh. It was so bad I hardly know where to begin. I'm sure it was supposed to be a poetic, heart-warming, smart, funny and intuitive women's film. It fails miserably. It was so bad that I'm actually angry at myself for wasting time watching it. Hoel reinforced every lame stereotype about women and men and she uses every single hackneyed plot device. Basically, the message is: women are idiots trampled on by men who are assholes, but if men just read Robin Norwood's Women Who Love Too Much and develop empathy for women, everyone will be happy. Seriously. That's it. That's the message of the film. The whole thing culminates in a hospital sequence with one woman giving birth (to a girl), one woman having sex in a back room, and one woman dying (oooh, the irony of life...). Then they all end up in church at the funeral of the woman who has died, with all the relationships repaired and the new mother connecting with the man (not her estranged husband, who is the father of the child) who helped her (intuitively, sensitively - seriously, he even rather incongruously had massage oil with him) through childbirth. This was more or less the same ending that incensed me with Thomas Vinterberg's Submarino. Somehow placing all the characters together in a church has become shorthand in Nordic film to signify that all is good and right with the world. Clearly Hoel had some kind of life changing experience after reading Women Who Love Too Much and decided that it was so important that she had to make a film about it, but the only thing worse than a self-help book is a self-help film...

Seriously, we enjoyed watching the few minutes of Hvem kan slå Aamodt og Kjus that we happened to turn on before starting the film a million times more.

Form og farge

My Dad is kind of a kook. He's been married to an equally kooky woman for the past twenty years or so, and they are definitely a good match. They just sent E a Halloween package, that among other things included this fabulous photograph of themselves:

Creepy, no? E really got into it, and slapped it up on the wall in our living room almost immediately. Only about two feet of scotch tape were involved in the process. I'm going to have to ask for a digital version of the photograph, since there's no way all that tape is going to come off without tearing the print.

Thanks to their package, though, I'm now thinking that maybe I should figure out some kind of low keyed Halloween activity for E and some friends. And of course if I do that, I'm going to need to work out a costume for him. I am thinking about some kind of Jedi costume, since he is totally obsessed with Anakin Skywalker right now (he refuses to believe that Anakin turns evil, even though he's well aware that Darth Vader was once Anakin. Too subtle for a six year old mind, apparently). I first thought of sewing one, but then I read somewhere that someone had just used a Karate outfit and dressed that up (belt, boots, light saber, easy cape). I think I can pull that off. I'll have to dye it dark for Anakin, of course, but I'm sure I can manage that.

This morning I finally picked up the rib-o-rama pullover so that I could knit the last two inches of the second arm. I had a sneaking suspicion there was something wrong, which is probably why I haven't looked at it all week. And wouldn't you know it, I had four stitches fewer on the second arm. Gah! I'm going to have to rip it all out and see where I went wrong in picking up stitches. What a drag.

Clearly this calls for some consolation (i.e. idiot-proof) knitting. I'm going to use the rest of the dark blue recycled yarn to make felted slippers for E. Here's this morning's start:

I'm knitting it with the yarn doubled to make extra thick slippers. The pattern is more or less this one, though I cast on 15 stitches, and am only using one color. I'm going to have to buy some "Formgummi" to smear on the soles to make them non-skid.

In a much larger constructive project, our garage is now starting to take form! This week the foundation was poured. It's still curing, but I think it's possible that we'll actually have a garage within the next two weeks (it's a modular construction, so once the foundation is done, it gets set up in a couple of days). Amazing. Here's a shot of the placement:

Of course it figures that we wouldn't get going on the project until the first snowfall! Thankfully, it doesn't look like it's going to start accumulating, and the weather is supposed to be a few degrees above 0 (celsius) during the day for the next week or so. Here's a shot from a different angle:

Our yard feels so much more open. We had to take down two large birch trees, and then this weekend the neighbor who lives in the white house you can just see behind ours has been cutting down a bunch of trees on his property. This is all very exciting, and exceptionally boring for anyone except the three of us who live here!

Tenke tenke skrive skrive

Today I hit 114 pages of manuscript on the Peer Gynt-book. Here's the page breakdown:

• intro: 1/10 pages (this is the hardest part to write. I'm saving it for the end. I need to come up with a theoretical approach lickity split. I mean, I have a theoretical approach, otherwise I couldn't write the material. I just don't have it laid out neatly yet.)
• chapter 1: 27/30 pages (from a 2008 article)
• chapter 2: 30/30 pages (all new material since August)
• chapter 3: 16/30 pages (half of a 2007 article)
• chapter 4: 11/30 pages (the other half of the 2007 article)
• chapter 5: 29/30 pages (all new material since September)
• conclusion: 0/10 pages (I have no idea what this is going to be. It seriously scares me. I hate conclusions. I think my friend L has a good one in her new book, so I need to read that for inspiration...)

Blimey. That's starting to look like a book manuscript! My English class was cancelled today, which gave me two extra hours of writing. I also had to submit my paper for that class on line. I'll be really curious to read the instructor's response. At least I had fun writing it.

I gave a lecture on Norway's national anthem in my literature class today. It was actually pretty fun. The students seemed to find it interesting to talk about national anthems as a genre. Here's a nice recording of the Norwegian one from 2005.

I ran across a thingy that I think I'm going to want to do an article on at one point: "Ekko av Ibsen," which was a big film project for the Ibsen centennial in 2006 consisting of 8 short films created in dialogue with Ibsen's work. Can't wait to check it out. I need to find out if any relate to Peer Gynt. If they don't, it will still probably be worth putting together an analysis. ETA: here's the list:

• Dobbel salto (Lars Göran Petterson, 2005), inspired by Bygmester Solness
• Klippan i livet - kan du leve uten? (Pia Lykke, 2005), inspired by Peer Gynt, Lille Eyolf, Fruen fra havet and Gengangere
• Nora (Geir Henning Hopland, 2005), inspired by Et dukkehjem
• Kjøter (Marius Holst, 2005)
• Edderkoppfest (Aril Østin Ommundsen, 2005)
• Trøbbel (Dag Johan Haugerud, 2005)
• Terje Vigen (Mari Monrad Vistven, 2005) inspired by the poem "Terje Vigen"
• Hvis jeg faller (Johanne Helgeland, 2005)

Basically, this is just a quick note to say I really dig my job.