Dissent!

I got into the International Grad Program at Stockholms Universitet. Its a seminar in political philosophy that focuses on global justice. The title is a bit misleading, the issues are on a more abstract level like legitimacy, validity and community/identity. The two Swedes that are involved in teaching the class are both out of the Rawls/Habermas (and Kant) school on universalizable liberalism (principles of pure reason, communicative ethics, first order norms, etc...). This puts me firmly in the opposing and under-represented hermeneutical non-liberal camp so it should be a real treat. The thing I am most stoked about is that the seminar is being directed by a series of political philosophers/philosophers (including the aforementioned Swedes) including Beitz, Föllesdal, Pogge, and Walzer. Föllesdal is actually Føllesdal the Norwegian whom some of you may know (Husserl, Heidegger), and Walzer is of course the editor of Dissent magazine. The others you would know if you studied political or social philosophy, and thanks to the division of labor you need not do that.

One more day here! I am so ready to go...walking through the sidewalks of this city is like playing American football and trying to find the hole (an interesting sidenote...when I first moved to Europe I used to say "football" and "European football." Now I say "football" and "American football." It became a matter of communicative necessity...for the same reasons it will easily dissolve). I can barely breathe I am so excited about leaving here. I got a haircut and everything today to commemorate the occasion. I did find out that British Airways may only let me check one bag going up there...I have to call but given my faith in the British ability to do nothing right I assume this will be the case. This means I have to leave yet another bag here and moving to Sweden has become a three-part process. I have to return here for exams in June anyway (and probably to get my Swedish visa). So my wonderful Norwegian friend has been nominated to store my luggage...its a favor returned really since I kept like 5 of her bags once. She thinks she is keeping "a few books"...yeah, a 100 lbs suitcase with a few books in it!

Something in the Way

I have been under an immense amount of pressure lately from about 20 different directions. This is the kind of span where people that no me steer clear and wait to come pick through the wreckage when the storm ends. So I have been, and will continue to be, a real jerk.

Read a short bio on Van Gogh yesterday...supposedly his last words were "the sadness will go on forever..." Its unfortunate the way we romanticize artists that are hurting...really. I wonder how alone it must feel for people to look at your sadness with admiration and mythic awe. Lost voices...Van Gogh was not a "tragic genius"...he was a brilliant man with a superabundance of sadness...at least his brilliance was not lost forever...he was...

Home

I don't know what home is anymore...I can honestly say that I like SD best because so far its my favorite place to be alone. Only very rarely do I get lonely in SD because I have so much to busy myself with if I want to. Over here I am sitting around all the time and that has me lonely most of the time. If anything I am a completely uprooted person. Generally being in our world is an uncomfortable experience for me. I feel often like I was born in the wrong time and place...like I have little in common with anyone. I get frustrated with everyone knowing what I should be doing, the whole world seems to have an idea of what I should busy myself with. I think that the period of time I live in is the worst that has ever existed in Historic human experience. "But Tim, we have so much more junk now than we ever have." The Middle Ages were ravaged by war and disease and Western civilization survived by a series of fortunate accidents. Today we are ravaged by things, technology, money...our malady is more thorough than any that has ever been experienced. I have no doubt that if man ever emerges from this dark period he will look back on our time and think "we barely survived that intact." I do not think we will survive it though...we will become more and more decadent, otherworldly, greedy and a-communal. When a society pressures you to the breaking point to stop thinking so much and get a crummy repetitive job then all is near lost. Many people want more time off from work...I suggest we make an agreement with management that if we take some extra time on nights and weekends to train our dogs to do the work we do...and in most cases they can be trained to do our jobs...then we will share time with them, and take time off to try to recover humanity from its abyssmal state. We are not human by nature...we cultivate the (mis-named) "human" side of our existence. Today we no longer esteem those who preserve and generate our excellences...we praise the people who consume and regurgitate the most "things." What will be our legacy, what will we leave to future generations? Fortune magazines 100 wealthiest people, People magazines "sexiest" celebrity, a whole host of gadgets that set ourselves further from our hearts in the guise of making people "more connected." What is a self, we are in no position to say...we the most "self-less" of all epochs...selfless is not an ethical evaluation! What is a home? We who think we have abolished the need for corporeal encounters and spatial proximity with cell phones and the Internet! How dare we speculate. Here is what I am saying, if everyone is content with watching our civilization go down the tubes in the name of progress and success then you can have it. I place myself firmly in the other camp, with the madmen who think that thought, engagement, community and the like are still the basis of a healthy existence in a depraved world...here is a metaphor, which we supra-liguistic unworldy beasts may not understand anymore...we are walking through the ashes...I am looking for a fire in a world that favors one with the biggest pile of rubble. If I have to live forever outside in discomfort then this is my gift to the "taking-world." Sometimes one should look at the symbols and coding pressuring you to be one of the many and say whether or not this is the kind of existence we really want to be cultivating...if so then that is fine, but your "self-being" is made significant in opposition to my alienation...I do not know what to say anymore...I could never say what I mean anyway because what I am trying to mean is required to be without sense in order to maintain the meaningfulness of that which I speak against....

Something Vague

"You get six months to adapt, and then two more two leave town..."

Song lyrics I heard today...funny. Just a warning...this is long, boring and I refuse to revise it. I have a really really bad case of writer's block right now. People that are acquainted with the way I work know that it is a real oscillation between frenzy and nothing. I have never actually learned how to be a university student. You know, like doing research, preparing and writing a paper, studying for exams, taking notes, etc... In three years of law school I have one small notebook of notes...mostly doodling, writing down quotes I remembered, etc... Most of the time in law school I sat in the back row with one of Nietzsche's books under my desk reading. I would do my readings for school on the weekends and memorize the court cases. So if I got called on I could usually step write into the discussion based on what I remembered from my readings. Here at the LSE I never get involved in the discussion. I sit there and draw pictures in my notebook or read photocopied essays. For my time at the LSE I have 3 pages of notes, and nobody, including myself, can read my notes. So paper-writing, yeah I don't know how its done. I have an impulse to write and when it comes it is very natural to me. I can sit and write for 20 straight hours if that is needed for a big paper. If it is coming then it usually comes out in one draft as the form I will submit, I always get As on my papers so what I am doing works...I know I have yet to write anything good though, my standards for excellence and the university's are at odds. The problem is that when I am not "just writing" as comes natural to me then I am sitting like an idiot in front of a computer screen waiting to catch fire and go. I have been staring at this stuff for three days..."Come on mind, I am pretty sure you are still up there...what are you waiting for!? Be brilliant!" :) My humility is known around the world...so I will sit here all night until my hands start going and then essays will be done. I am so preoccupied though that I am afraid this writer's block will drag over firm deadlines. I have made it pretty clear here that I have no intention of sticking to deadlines for ungraded essays...but I just need to get these dumb things out of the way so I can get on to the matter at hand.

Ok...above section of unstructured time-wasting exercise is complete...not part two...what is on my mind. First of course is money...I hate money and its going to be a tight summer. A tight summer won't be bad, but I am trying to get everything budgeted...how will I afford the language class, flights back and forth, etc...until the autumn when I suspect fortune will begin to fall into my lap either via the disgusting profession known as the law or high interest intellectual welfare. The bigger issue, and the one that brings the money one up, is that I am very very unsettled and I am conjuring a leap at some point. I know what I am circling, the question is whether or not I will just say it out loud and launch my offensive. I am not 100% about Sweden. I am 100% that I love it there...its a very very good city. It is precisely the kind of society I want to be in. The monkey on my back is that I do not see myself anywhere other than San Diego. I was telling my friend last night that I had one big goal in life when I was about 17...get to California. Everything was organized around that and motivated by it. I still have the journal entry that I wrote my freshman year in university...I marked out exactly how long I would take to graduate from undergrad, when I would take what courses, what I expected my GPA to be at certain points. I would then go to law school at USD...in my life I have only applied to three universities and I have taken for granted that I will get into all of them...I did. So law school, early graduation, honors, etc...these were all really just lovely pretexts to get me to California. So I got there and it was never-ending felicity...right! At the beginning it was miserable, I was broke, I was in the midst of a mental breakdown I think. I still cannot stand the summer time there, I don't like tourists, I honestly get sick of the weather always being so nice, I hate southern Californian "do nothing" ethos, I must confess that San Diego is one of the most spiritually vapid cities I have ever been in. If you want to draw inspiration from the culture you are in then do not go to SD. I have a very balanced life there. I was working and I loved my job, I was doing extremely well in law school despite myself, creatively I was at a maximum in side reading and writing, I am not sure I have ever been more fit physically, I had a few good friends, and I could surf. I had cafes and bookstores I liked going to, I could go kick the soccer ball or throw the baseball/football at LJHS, I had great places to run, my best friend had just moved out there and we would meet up a couple times a week and run. I could also see and talk to my family frequently. Hmmm...I have some major decisions to make. Fortunately my hatred of San Diego summers gives me time to really push the Sweden thing to its logical conclusion, or lack thereof. I think next Christmas will be decision point...unless everything falls through and I have to come back in September. I always joke that San Diego has always been a great "plan B" while I am over here...the funny, perhaps sad, truth is that plan B is the only plan still! Just like it was when I was 17...everything else simply is by virtue of not being San Diego.

What will he do!

A Companion in a Wood

Life begins, as its often conceived with quaint charm, in a "miracle." Life ends accidently...were it not so, were we not accidental, then we would be without dignity. Contingency is the price of our freedom, which is, in turn, the evidence of our significance. The in-between is spanned by a gathering mistake, evident in revelatory terms by the very degree of our "fallenness." We are born into a "falling over."

Consciousness is always false. Awareness of our imbalance, lack of equilibrium, disorientation, is met with bewilderment that covers itself instantly in a self. We ate once of knowledge, but only for a moment, and then out of our infinite shame we clothed "our" selves. Against the firm heavens of the I (eye, there is something to the homonym!) we have come to see that it is the world itself that spins and not our perspective. In some instances modern art has placed the spin back into the perspective, but it is met immediately with the frightful howels and accusations of the many..."Degradation! Falsity! Heresy!" The spinning artist is a madman, the only other possibility is that we are all madmen and that is semantically impossible.

Friendship in the 21st century sense is just making sure that a set of ears is around as your tree falls. This way the issue never comes up of whether or not we made noise. This is essential to our sense of personal security (a redundancy) because truth itself is the correspondence between our making a racket and someone else having to listen to it. I have made noise here, and you have heard it...therefore I exist.

"Another Day"

Another day. I follow another path,
Enter the leafing woodland, visit the spring
Or the rock where the roses bloom
Or search from a look-out, but nowhere

Love are you to be seen in the light of day
And down the wind go the words of our once so
Beneficient conversation...

Your beloved face has gone beyond my sight,
The music of your life is dying away
Beyond my hearing and all the songs
That worked a miracle of peace once on

My heart, where are they now? It was long ago,
So long and the youth I was has aged nor is
Even the earth that smiled at me then
The same. Farewell. Live with that word always.

For the soul goes from me to return to you
Day after day and my eyes shed tears that they
Cannot look over to where you are
And see you clearly ever again.

Holderlin

This is a quick note before I leave. I have had a good time here...now I go back to London for 11 days to tie up some loose ends, get the rest of myself, and see a few friends for the last time. I already cannot wait to get back! I wish I could just stay here and get my stuff delivered up here.

Idag är Påskdag...Jag läser och tittar på tv i min lägenhet.

Om Min Lägenhet

Jag är i min lägenhet nu. Min lägenhet är jättebra. Det finns två sovrum, ett kök, ett vardagsrum och ett badrum. Det finns en säng, två garderober, en bokhylla och ett sängbord i min sovrum. Det ligger några boker på bokhyllan och sängbordet. Jag behöver en annan bokhylla.

I vardagsrummet finns det två soffor, en cykel, en bokhylla, ett bord, en tv, och en piano. Bordet ligger mellan soffan och tv-n. Bokhyllan står framför fönsteret. Lilla soffan är bredvid bokhyllan, eller mellan bokhyllan och tv-n.

Det finns ett bord, en spis, en frys, och fyre stolen i köken. Bordet och stolen är bredvid fönsteret. Frysen står framför spisen. Stolen är under bordet!

The grammer is probably not perfect, but that is me explaining my apartment in Swedish. A pretty bare-bones description because it is exhausting to try to do. That is one of the things I know too!! If I meet someone I can tell them my name, what I do, where I am from, where I live, where that is, some things I like to do, about my family, and how my apartment is set up. That would make a fairly odd conversation. I am understanding a little more as the days go by, which is good.

I watched a movie the other day...the movie was in Mandarin and the subtitles were Swedish...I did fairly well understanding the movie and asked my roommate when I was not sure. Then the next day I sat down with a dictionary and the newspaper and I was really frustrated. I am also picking up a little bit more of what people say...mostly because I have relaxed and started listening as hard as I can.

I was at the train station and the train I needed was closed for repair and the guy started to tell me what I needed to do in Swedish and I got really frustrated. Then I calmed down and realized that I could understand quite a bit of what he was saying if I just listened. I made it through the situation in Swedish and got home ok. I watch some show that looks like a Swedish Sesame Street in the mornings sometimes and I get a little of that. Its a humbling experience and the patience and humility are the toughest things...oh yeah! and I had a conversation with like a three year old kid that lives underneath me and I understood all of that!

I went on a decent run yesterday. I found a relatively flat trail that sort of goes through the suburbs along the highway. The hills were too much for me at this point, I am basically starting over again. I got completely lost but somehow ended up at the shopping center across the highway...I honestly never crossed the highway so I must have come into a warp-zone somehow.

Det är fint väder i dag och i går ochså. Solen skiner och det är tio grader varmt i Stockholm. Its been really nice the last couple days...the sun comes up pretty early now and goes down pretty late. he next few weeks will be the turn here in seasons. It happens quick in Scandinavia because of all the daylight. Things bloom, turn green, and warm up fairly quickly. It will not get much warmer than the 60s though...which is perfect for me.

I bought my ticket back here for April 29th. Anything earlier had gotten really expensive and this was the earliest I could go. It turns out that I probably will not need a visa for my summer language classes since they are less than three months. I really think I can pull the language thing off...but I really need to start working in September or the gravy train will come to a halt (and there has not been much gravy on the train the last 5 or 6 years! more like the bread, cereal and water train...the food train).

That is all for now. I really wish I could get back earlier, but at least this way I can maybe get a paper done in London before I return, see my Norwegian friend, and see a couple friends from France (that I met in Copenhagen) who will be coming into London at the end of the month.

Glad Påsk!

Easter weekend...everything is closed for a few days in advance and a few days following. Its just one more excuse for the Swedes not to work. I went someplace yesterday and I found that it was closed (as was everything else). Yesterday was Långfredag...hmm, ok. I am definately back in Scandinavia.

So today I was trying to come up with a funny hippy name for a kid...I was inspired by the 3000th time I saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers new video for the song "Dani California." The one rule was that it had to include the name "California" as a first or middle name. What happened, is that I accidently happened on a pretty cool one!!! The name is, now get this, Chrysanthemum California! First and middle name. We can see the hippy genesis of the name in its bearing the name of a flower.

I have decided that I will name my first daughter Chrysanthemum California (this should worry nobody since I will not have kid). It can be shortened to "Chrys" or "Cali." Basically, the only requirement I have in finding a wife is that she consent to my naming ideas...I have a first male name too, but we will save that for another post when nothing is going on in my life...so she has to give me full artistic freedom in naming the children. I also have to be allowed to start indoctrinating them at the first point they begin to demonstrate sentience. I have a pedagogical procedure laid out...and the substance...I refuse to edit this.

Time Out...Lonely Planet...

I need to get a city guide or travel book or something for this city. Two days of looking for two rather large places have left me without result. This is a pretty small city too. Its just confusing. Some islands are all very narrow and winding cobblestone streets, and even if I keep walking the same way...away from my origin...I end up back where I began. Sometimes I do not even recall crossing a bridge but find myself on a completely different island. There is one set of bridges that all cross at the same point, but it is like a choose your own adventure story. It is literally a knot of concrete bridges that go to three different islands. If you make a mistake at the top then you end up on the wrong one.

MTV Europe plays videos a better part of the day than the US version...the catch is that it plays the same 4 videos over and over again. Three of them are Kanye West videos and the other is the Chili Peppers new video...interesting the first four times I saw it and tried to guess what band their outfits referred to. How many songs specifically about California have the Chili Peppers done...I suggest they release a compilation of their greatest hits about California. The may be the only people who like California more than I do!

Right now though, the top ten videos of 1997 are on. In retrospect 1997 was not such a bad year, I remember it being kind of a vacuum...thats simply because my taste was terrible. So far we have had The Verve, Daft Punk, Jamiroquai, etc...a few bad ones too. Funny thing is that the "good ones" are ones I would not have liked then, besides The Verve. When I say that 97 was not bad I am referring to music videos...otherwise every year in high school was bad...freshman year less so...they got increasingly worse as each year passed. Senior year was like the Middle Ages. The people who said "high school will be the best four years of your life" need to indulge in a few more experiences...I am positive that statement can only be true if high school were among the only identifiable periods of your life...high school was pure misery...boring, oppressive, confining. This is partly due to the misfortune of being a "post-grunge" high school student when whining, angst and somber moods become hegemonic.

Cafe Edenborg

I found a great cafe the other day...Cafe Edenborg. You have no idea how much I wish it was called Cafe Swedenborg and was possessed of all the mystical baggage. Anyway, it has big overstuffed leather chairs and couches. The music is pretty good and not so obtrusive that you notice it unless you want to. The coffee is ok.

Coffee here seems to be giving in small servings, not the Starbucks canteens of coffee in the largest version (I cannot remember if this is the "Grande" or "Venti" or something else even). This was obnoxious at first because it just means that I will spend more money getting the gallon of black coffee I drink a day. At Edenborg though (and at The World News Cafe, the other one I go to) the refills are free!

Stockholm has a good cafe culture. I was reading in the Time Out Stockholm, which I drop in to the bookstore once a day to thumb through, that besides Finland the Swedes drink more coffee than anyone else in Europe! A bit of a surprise to me...I thought the French or Italians would drink more. Swedes average 4.5 cups a day...mind you these cups are not what you are thinking of...it is a little more than a double expresso in quantity. But still...in Denmark I was convinced that the Danes stayed thin on the back of their 6 pack a day collective smoking habit, in Sweden it is the 5 cups of coffee a day I suppose.

In retrospect, I knew a Swedish girl in London that must have drank between 4 and 7 Starbucks coffees a day...that is intense. I imagine you could make this girl jump 10 feet in the air if you snuck up behind her and clapped.

It has gotten really cold here the last day or so...been snowing a lot. I am even considering putting the fleece liner back in my jacket. I would consider this a personal defeat (the people who surf with me know that I start testing the spring-suit the second the water gets above 62 degrees...same with the jacket here...I hate wearing it and I am looking for the earliest opportunity to get it off). I really do not mind the cold though anymore. It is a little frustrating that I feel like all the work I did suffering through the English winter is now set back 2-3 months simply by moving up here. You take the good with the bad.

I was wondering again today how much of day-to-day communication is anticipated. Like in a given situation you have a range of possible things you expect the other person to say, so you do not really listen...you give form to the noise coming out of their mouths in light of these expectations and when the noise seems to match one of them you respond properly. I am certain we do not listen purely and deeply in everyday conversation...partly because this is exhausting, and partly because we can never remove the anticipated aspect of our native tongue.

When you submerge in a new language though, with a very limited and early vocabulary, you find yourself capable of anticipated considerably less exchanges. In a classroom, I can anticipate nearly all of them because they are within a pre-arranged lesson plan and wholly contained in my limited vocabulary. Even when I am working in my limited vocabulary, but out of the classroom, I am accompanied by an intense anxiety...and on-edge feeling. You hope that something said will fit in the orbital of your limited expectations...but when it does not you have to listen very closely for a word you know, and at the same time you have to get a primitive understanding of the situation. Talking in a vacuum is basically impossible.

So when a lady in the cafe today asks me if she can take the seat opposite of me, that is no problem though I barely understood a word of it, because the circumstances made it clear and my possible responses were obvious...but later, when she apologized to me for her and her friends "invading my area" I had no idea what she was talking about. In fact, I was not even aware that I was being addressed. I think, even when you are not conversing, you maintain a range of possible expectations just below consciousness that allow you to recognize when you are being addressed...otherwise noise does not come to your attention unless it startles you to a greater or lesser degree. The kind of listening I have to do now is exhausting and frustrating.

Quite the Conundrum

I offer a bag of Bic disposable razors for anyone who can solve the following paradox. How is it that Bic has managed to manufacture a razor capable of cutting the skin under the hair without cutting the hair itself...again, I have no question mark (Jag har inte frågetecken). Take your time, I am sure I will still be bleeding when you get around to answering this on Monday.

I just watched the top ten Britney Spears videos on MTV Europe...the only Britney Spears song I like, "Toxic," (one of the best songs of the last five years!!) was number one...that was the only thing that could redeem suffering through the other nine videos.

Katten är i mit sovrum, och han är på min säng!

One of these cats is completely disobedient. If it were just daft and did not know what it was supposed to do that would be one thing, but it knows what it ought not do and still does it. I am charging my computer on my bed so I have the door to my room closed so the cat does not go in there and crawl on the computer or scratch the screen or something. Meanwhile, I am studying in the living room (vardagsrummet...among todays lessons is the names of rooms in an apartment, eller "en lägenhet" på svenska). Every two minutes the cat opens the door (dörren) to my bedroom and I have to go get it. So you have me throwing my books and yelling at a semi-conscious animal in a language I cannot speak. The cat goes under the bed and I cannot get it to come out (Kom här nu!).

Last night I was supposed to put them in the laundry room for bed and this same cat climbed up on a chair pushed under the kitchen table (på en stol under bordet) and it would not come out...everytime I pulled a chair out it moved to another chair. To get to the chairs closest to the window (stolen var bredvid fönsteret) I had to push in the outside chairs...when I did this and then pulled out the inside chairs the cat jumped to the recently pushed-in outside chairs!! I did not know what to do...millennia of intellectual development, the gift of techne and the much vaunted "reason" and I was effectively out-witted by a domestic cat. The situation was getting primitive, my Swedish commands were mixing with English...I had just watched "Donnie Brasco" and learned a few new choice phrases in Swedish that I let fly in the heat of the moment (I am going to start watching "Donnie Brasco" every night so I speak Swedish like a wiseguy...glöm om det!---"forgettaboutit!"). In an instant I had lost all the evolutionary advances of my species and I was prepared to resort to brute strength to demonstrate my superiority...

I decided that I needed to step out on the balcony for a second and take a deep breath. Three years of legal education, five plus years of formal philosophy education and the books had nothing to offer me now. Then I heard the shuffle of the rocks held within a cat poop-box! Could it be that nature had thwarted itself! I ran to the laundry room to find the devious feline engaged in relieving itself and I slammed the door shut with a smile...I have said before that I would never have kids...I swear that I will never have kids!!

Shower

A good shower is essential for mental health. I almost forgot, in that dehumanizing monkey-like shower in my apartment in London, how great a nice shower could be. In fact, I think that my attitude in London was largely determined by my freezing, squatting down and pathetic shower each morning. My best days were days when I managed to score a shower somewhere else.

Det Går Bra Nu

Above is the title from, perhaps, the stupidest song I have ever heard in my life. It never ceases to amaze me how the crummiest aspects of American pop culture seem to export so well. "Det Går Bra Nu" means "It Goes Well Now" and it is the Swedish incarnation of terrible hip-hop. I used to think that bad pop-punk was the easiest repeatable pop music genre and that is why it is so (over-) represented in the lower eschelons of what the rabble enjoy musically...I was overlooking the obvious pinnacle of poor taste in music, the cascade of nihilistic and consumerist hip-hop.

There is good hip-hop, and I am by no means the best judge of what is and is not good in this genre...my ear for this type of music is anything but fine-tuned. With that said, the untrained ear knows terrible when it hears it, and a lot of this is terrible...the only thing worse is the European hack-copies of it (there is good European hip-hop). This song is by a bunch of shaved-head Swedes and it is the only Swedish language music I have heard on MTV here (they play The Sounds a lot, Swedish of course, but they sing in English).

One more criticism about Nordic life. I am not one to criticize Scandinavian girls, until now...from a guy who comes from basically the capital of sunshine-summer-beach lifestyle I can say without hyperbole that fake tans almost always look terrible. Orange does not equal authentic, now a fake tan can be ok on the surface if done carefully (still no point and really adds nothing, we are now talking about "good" as in something short of bad...damage control basically). Being fair to the Nordics, they have no point of reference given the fact that there is no sun here...but I have never seen more bad fake tans in my life. A good rule of thumb, if it requires a light, lying in something that looks like a space-aged coffin, a spray or a cream then it is best to stay clear. I am not sure that Michaelangelo could paint that bronze on properly.

Solen skiner idag! It was a beautiful day, warm and sunny. The snow is starting to melt, ice drifts were floating through the locks...beautiful sunset this evening. The city was nice today. I went to Kulturhuset, basically a center with an art gallery, a theatre and an opera. There is also a cafe called the "World News Cafe" with tvs showing a lot of different news shows and with like 100 different newspapers. I sat there and read for a while. Walked around and bought a American-British-Swedish plug converter. First place would not let me get it because my drivers license picture does not look like me...it was at this point that I realized that I have no picture IDs that resemble me now. I am struggling getting around with my Swedish and running into the "Swedish people talking to me in English" problem because I run out of things I can say in Swedish. I held up the whole line at the grocery store today because the girl asked me a question I did not understand but I would not let her explain it in English. It was kind of fun and the people were amused.

I did my first run today and it was a spectacular failure. There are no flat parts of my town except the bridge over the highway and inside the shopping center. I was hurting and I ended up coming in and doing 20 minutes on the stationary bike because of my poor showing. In a few weeks I will get better.

My roommate is an actress and she leaves town almost every weekend to go to film shoots. Next weekend she is going to be in Sodom too for a film shoot and staying right by my flat there (I have to go back on the 18th for a week or so). Maybe I will go check it out. Its Swedish language, low-budget stuff but interesting nevertheless. So the weekends are mostly just me and the kids, I mean the cats...but I feel like I have kids. One likes me, the other is being aloof but I think he likes me too. They are smart and mischevious...they can open everything in this apartment, doors, cupboard, refrigerator, drawers. They are also the only living things I can communicate effectively with in Swedish. My Swedish language ability is slightly worse than that of a cat!

So tonight me and the cats will watch "Donnie Brasco" I think. Tomorrow my roommates friend is coming over to take them for the rest of the weekend...I could have watched them, but I will not complain about a breather away from the kids. Next weekend one of my American friends might come up from London for the weekend...could be fun.

Tomorrows plan...wait around for the baby-sitter to come get the kids and then go to the city to read and try to make friends. Today making friends did not go so well because the book I had was so good and I had to be home by 6 pm to feed the children. Thats all for now...oh yeah, Arsenal beat Juventas in two straight matches to go into the UEFA Cup semi-finals. So its AC Milan vs. Barcelona (should be an awesome match-up!!!) and I do not remember who Arsenal is playing but I am pulling for Arsenal...they are my favorite club based entirely on their how cool their uniforms look.

I have two goals up going into autumn...get good at Swedish (write a decent dissertation is a sub-goal) and get dred-locks and a Jesus beard for my sisters wedding...I will wear a Phish or Grateful Dead shirt to the reception.

From a Basement on a Hill

Well, I have arrived...after several harrowing months in Sodom and Gomorrah (both former municipalities sprawled out so much that they ended up combining, these days we refer to this Mega-Metro-Urban dystopia as London). As a preface I should say that I cannot find all the punctuation on this keyboard, in short this means no quotes or rhetorical questions today.

Anyway, my new apartment is fantastic! It is a bit out of the city, but the city is very accessible by train and I have a month train pass...about 80 dollars (this is about half of a month pass in London for 2 zones on the Underground...I can, with this pass, use all of Stockholms public transport both in the city and the outer lying communities). I also do not know where the apostrophe is...so no conjunctions and the possessives will be improper...in Swedish you do not use punctuation in the possessive form, just add an s...that is what I will do for now. My area seems great. Slow and boring no doubt, but after the cacophony of poorly arranged sensations I have just left, the quiet is a benefit (I am a curmudgeon, and a luddite to boot!). The biggest upside is that it is all forest and hills...very pretty, and more than ideal running terrain.

I picked up pretty much where I left off when I was last in Scandinavia. This morning I had a bowl of muesli and strawberry yogurt, coupled with a glass of mineral water because I misread the label on the bottle...ah, the joys of living in a foreign land. I have on schedule for lunch today a PB and J sandwich made of that thick heavy sponge they call bread up here, great great jelly, and terrible peanut-butter.

At the market, I was quick to notice nothing has changed. Still small, expensive and with more selection of chocolate than food. I bought my grocery bags because in Scandinavian communism the people have stopped regulating any aspect of their lives so in order to encourage conservation the government makes it expensive to be wasteful...when you buy a plastic or glass bottle you pay about a one dollar deposit on it that you get back when you recycle the bottle. I kind of like it to be honest with you...its a brilliant idea.

Conservation and recycling are good, but they are public goods so people do not register in their day to day lives the impact of being wasteful. Lazy and close-minded people...and lets face it we all are (do not make me get philosophical about the impossibility of the open-mind)...can be made to contribute to the public good by shifting a small part of the burden to them personally. Recycling deposits do this. If you pay for your grocery bags then you find yourself taking two of them out of the closet before you go back to the store next time as opposed to buying new ones each time. It is simply distributing the commons to avoid the oft-mentioned tragedy of the commons...its the model that the world is trying to take with corporate waste, simply shift some of the burden back to individual corporations, anaolgous to the recycling deposit, and the corporation will reduce waste and the costs will be off-set by the (often pecuniary) benefits of preserving public goods.

The USA, in our never-ending wisdom, disagree with this model because we are incapable of thinking in the distance, either temporally or spatially (is the war on terrorism not the perfect model of American ad-hoc-ism...we are capable, both collectively and individually, of planning about 7 minutes into the future and about the control of the things within about 3 feet of our physical bodies...see the deficit and credit industry in America if you must). You can never explain to the board of an American corporation that paying 2 extra dollars is actually saving countless money in the preservation of a public good.

It all fits our never-ending quest to destroy the idea of anything common. Private this, individual that...I hope we could all see by the model above that we do take up the costs of damage to public goods, that it is the case that we do not see everyday these costs so we take them for granted (and being selfish is not natural, I will hear nothing of how destructive laissez-faire capitalism is our -natural state-...large coordinated economies themselves are unnatural, whatever form they take...and how they tend to form you...conventional in the highest degree). So these everyday costs are taken for granted, but we have, in our highly unnatural conventional markets, mechanisms for localizing the burden. When the burden is localized then our atomized anti-social society can preserve the public good despite itself.

Mini-rant over, pending anything else coming into my mind. I said nothing had changed in Scandinavian grocery store, this is not the whole truth because the was one remarkable change. I was completely comfortable, at-home, in the grocery store. Grocery stores are my litmus test for how rootless and alienated I am in a new place. If I feel like I am depressed or about to have a panic attack everytime I go into a grocery store then I am not at-home. I could not hide my smile yesterday! I knew the lay-out of the store, I could read most of the labels when I took the time to look, which I often did not do because I was so at-ease that presence seemed unwarranted.

I mentioned before that Denmark was the closest thing to a home I have in Europe, I think this was manifest in yesterdays shopping experience here in Sweden. Sweden is different than Denmark and they are both different from Norway...this is also the case with regard to Swedes, Danes and Norwegians (less so than they think). I am completely comfortable here and with these people.

Jag skal läser Heidegger nu. Hej då!

Lebensphilosophie

"In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience...man as he is, uniquely himself to every last movement of his muscles, more, that in being thus strictly consistent in uniqueness he is beautiful, and worth regarding, and in no way tedious...

But even if the future gave us no cause for hope-- the fact of our existing at all in this here-and-now must be the strongest incentive to us to live according to our own laws and standards: the inexplicable fact that we live precisely today, when we had all infinite time in which to come into existence, that we possess only a shortlived today in which to demonstrate why and to what end we came into existence now and no other time. We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance. One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it. Why go on clinging to this clod of earth, this way of life, why pay heed to what our neighbor says? It is so parochial to bind one's self to views which are no longer binding even a couple hundred miles away. Orient and Occident are chalk-lines drawn before us to fool our timidity. I will make an attempt to attain freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and is it to be hindered in this by the fact that two nations happen to hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that around it a religion is taught which did not yet exist a couple of thousand years ago. All that is not you, it says to itself. No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would bear you through this stream; but only at the cost of yourself: you would put yourself in pawn and lose yourself. There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead? Do not ask, go along it. Who was it that said, 'a man never rises higher than when he does not know whither his path can still lead him?'"

Nietzsche. "Schopenhauer as Educator," Untimely Meditations

Proto-existentialist? Its fun sometimes to find passages in Nietzsche that fore-shadow entire 20th-century philosophical endeavours. The following quote, alone, that opens the above passage is testament to Nietzsche's gift: "In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is..."

Some may think that this is at odds with the eternal recurrence of the same. I think, on the other hand, that this passage is a strong indicator of what he is getting at with the eternal recurrence of the same, "amor fati," and the self as "a sum of its effects."

"A philosopher must be very honest not to call poetry or rhetoric to his aid."

Attributed by Nietzsche to Schopenhauer without citation.

Joy and Sadness

What bold-easy step
Walks through the innermost realm
Of grandame's fairytale garden?

What rousing call does the bugler's
Silver horn cast in the tangle
Of the Saying's deep slumber?

What secret breath
Of melancholy just fled
Nestle's into the soul?

"The first stanza sings of the step as the journey through the realm of Saying. The second stanza sings of the call that awakens Saying. The third stanza sings of the breath that nestles into the soul. Step (that is, way) and call and breath hover around the rule of the word. Its mystery has not only disturbed the soul that formerly was secure. It has also taken away the soul's melancholy which threatened to drag it down. Thus, sadness has vanished from the poet's relation to the word. This sadness concerned only his learning of renunciation. All this would be true if sadness were the mere opposite to joy, if melancholy and sadness were identical.

But the more joyful the joy, the more pure the sadness slumbering within it. The deeper the sadness, the more summoning the joy resting within it. Sadness and joy play into each other. The play itself which attunes the two by letting the remote be near and the near be remote is pain. This is why both, highest joy and deepest sadness, are painful each in its way. But pain so touches the spirit of mortals that the spirit receives its gravity from pain. The gravity keeps mortals with all their wavering at rest in their being. The spirit which answers to pain, the spirit attuned by pain and to pain, is melancholy. It can depress the spirit, but it can also lose its burdensomeness and let its 'secret breath' nestle into the soul, bestow upon it the jewel which arrays it in the precious relation to the word, and with this raiment shelters it."

Heidegger "Words"