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Swamp

Confessions of an Academic Pseudo-Giraffe
27.2.04  
Help! I'm floating in absolute solitude in this virtual universe, and yet there's an uncanny feeling that I'm being observed!
Remember Mikhail Bakhtin? He was the legendary Russian literary scholar who, as the story has it, used the only manuscript for his book on the Bildungsroman as cigarette paper during the 900-day siege of Leningrad, 1941-1944. He'd been working on the text for years. I hope he enjoyed the smokes. Btw, he is also responsible for the continuous echo of the words 'dialogism' and 'carnival' in the corridors of the world's lit departments.

Anyway, recently I've been drawn to the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope, partly because others working on contemporary urban fiction have pointed out its usefulness, but also because the term is so beautifully symmetric and complete and big: chronos and topos, time and place. The connections of temporal and spatial variables in literary representation.

But this concept should not be exclusive to academic discourse or literary theory. We should use it in the same way we talk about squirrels and shoes and pain and spirituality. I think it could be particularly useful in describing how different ways of moving about produce different experiences of space and time. I'm not just talking about velocity being a combination of distance and time. The way in which one perceives surrounding space also depends on the method of movement (or transport).

The pedestrian chronotope. The bicycle chronotope. The car c. The train c. The plane c, the roller coaster c, the subway c, the ice skating c, the swimming c, the camel-riding c. The paragliding c. The kangaroo ball c.

I like the pedestrian chronotope very much: the freedom from haste and technological mediation, the feeling of contact with the bedrock, the slow passing of scenery, the luxury of using 15 minutes for a distance of one kilometre.
26.2.04  
This thing has apparently been in the news (I don't know how widely distributed) about four years ago:

Fact 1: George W. Bush was asked to name his favourite childhood book.
Fact 2: Bush named The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle.
Fact 3: Bush was born in 1946.
Fact 4: The Very Hungry Caterpillar was published in 1969.
Conclusion 1: Bush read no books as a child.
Conclusion 2: After receiving his B.A in history from Yale in 1968, Bush felt ready to tackle The Very Hungry Caterpillar and was so impressed that the book has had a retrospective influence on his childhood memories.

Tuo kirja on muuten suomenkieliseltä nimeltään Pikku toukka paksulainen.

A quote for the night (I don't have to name the source, do I?):

"If you don't stand for anything, you don't stand for anything. If you don't stand for something, you don't stand for anything."
24.2.04  
I have 18 books sitting on my desk right now. Some of them I need, but what are the rest of them doing here?

This morning, I translated into English a brief epigraph from an obscure collection of Finnish poetry and sent it by e-mail to someone who might use it in his book on the history of a certain strand of terrorism, starting from a famous arsonist in ancient Greece. This sentence carries one of the oddest messages I've ever put into words.
23.2.04  
I quote the New York Times which today quoted Jay Leno from The Tonight Show who had quoted John Kerry's clear victory margin in recent Democratic primaries somewhere: "not too bad. That begs the question: So John, why the long face?"

Leno is doing rather well himself, I suppose. So Jay, why...
21.2.04  
No niin. Vietin tässä pari tuntia opetellen tämän näkymän muokkausta. Kiehtovaa. Ehkä vielä joskus haluan sen näyttävän oikeasti hyvältä.

Olen huomenna menossa Clevelandin alueen suomalaisten epäviralliseen tapaamiseen, jossa iltaa vietetään kutsun mukaan "pikkupurtavan äärellä". Tuollaiset sanavalinnat kyllä saavat ajatukset ajelehtimaan vauhdikkaasti kotimaan kamaralle. Sain kutsun eräältä iäkkäältä rouvalta, joka oli nähnyt kuvani ja nimeni kommuunistamme taannoin sorvatussa lehtiartikkelissa ja laskenut yhteen kaksi plus kaksi.

This looks like a good weekend for serious reading and, perhaps, some half-serious running. I'm obligated to get up tomorrow morning relatively early (due to the "shopping helper" assignment that everyone in this house likes so much). Ideally, that will serve as a jump-start to an active day of high self-discipline and considerable workload. Plan B: back to sleep by 9.30, and the classic 'where did my day go?' feeling in the afternoon ("It's a Saturday", whispers the fork-waving little red devil on my left shoulder).

Today's game results: Minesweeper 312 sec., Fowl Words (www.m-w.com) 98700.
20.2.04  
Posted a pic of myself in a sudden frenzy of self-satisfaction. This is back in the old days. Man, I look good here.
17.2.04  
A couple of random seeds of thought on travelling.

An airport is a place where everyone carrying a bag is in limbo, and everyone else's job is to try and make them forget it.

Human consciousness is not changing as rapidly as some argue. Air travel is still too fast to be comprehended as movement in relation to any single immobile object outside the plane. However uncomfortable long flights can be, probably the most genuine essence of air travel reveals itself when one flies from Japan to the Americas, and the plane lands at the destination at same time, on the same day, as it took off at the place of departure.
16.2.04  
How to lose your credibility as a lecturer in front of a critical academic audience, part 1:

Speak about the Internet. Adopt the vernacular and performing style of a Southern Baptist preacher. Quote Bill Gates. Explain the use of the quote by saying that such a rich man cannot be wrong. Use Gates's comment to construct the argument that the Internet has created a positive revolution in civil society. Emphasise that websites, e-mail, and the Internet in general are free media. Express no qualms about the association of Microsoft with the principles of free access, free choice, political radicalism, and democratic grass-root level participation. To conclusively prove the power of the net, talk about the success of the Howard Dean campaign.
Home bittersweet home (kind of). We had an interesting episode in our little Fulbright seminar yesterday morning. About 25 of us were scheduled to clean a park on the outskirts of DC as part of the overall program item "hands-on volunteer work". This is how it went, more or less:

8.15 Everyone is supposed to meet in the hotel lobby.
8.35 Everyone is in the lobby.
8.40 Chartered bus to do dirty work.
9.00 The park looks empty and relatively clean except for a small area around a brook which flows a few meters below everything else, among an indescribable amount of junk. The thought arises that mountaineering ropes might turn out useful if cleaning that hole is our job.
9.05 No-one else is there. The girl who works for the seminar tries desperately to contact someone (from the park department?).
9.10 One of the Germans finds a basketball.
9.11 A football game (the universal kind) is in full swing on the concrete basketball court, with improvised goal posts.
9.15 Who cares about the project? It seems obvious that English is no longer the truest common language we have.
9.20 One of the Africans mistakes his opponents for slalom flags and zigzags through their defense, showing off his technique.
9.30 I score my first goal.
9.35 One of the Germans scores his tenth (my subjective estimate). Another one gets entangled with the broken wire-net fence that lines the court. Another slips and gets his jeans dirty. The match continues.
9.40 We're down to t-shirts and sweating. No-one knows the score, or cares.
9.50 Goals. Headers from Peru, long shots from Bangladesh, half-volleys from Finland, heel taps from Ivory Coast.
10.10 We're told that nobody has been able to contact anyone relevant, and we should return to the hotel.
10.12 Chartered bus back to the world of name tags and institutional affiliations.

Tarinan tarkoitus ei ole todistaa jalkapallon hienoutta - se ei todisteluja kaipaa - vaan ihmetellä, kuinka tietyt kommunikaation muodot vain toimivat paremmin kuin toiset.
13.2.04  
A quick note thrown from the shade of U.S. national monuments. On one of today's lectures at the seminar: It's extremely refreshing to hear intelligent, no-nonsense responses stripped of decorative diplomacy, especially when they come from a representatíve of a third-world country, and the original question has been offered from the speaker's box with an air of pseudo-critical patronising grace. If someone, a kind of cultural ambassador, comes from an area where 95 per cent of the population have never heard of the Internet, would they really want to analyse seriously the influence of that electronic megastructure on the past development of civil society there? Some people would expect them to. In these circumstances, I don't want to hear the phrase "worldwide network" too many times per hour.

But it's been great. Really. Especially the offhand comments that crisscross in the air after programmed events. Hyvää yötä.
10.2.04  
I am going to spend the rest of the week in a seminar in Washington, DC. The program will include lots of meetings with lots of intelligent individuals, a lunch with people from the State Department, a dinner cruise on the Potomac, top quality lectures, good food, and generally the opportunity to converse with human beings who might well leave their mark on the world of tomorrow.

I don't really want to go.

Of course, afterwards it will feel like a uniquely enlightening experience. I hope. Perhaps it's the prospect of four consecutive days of polite and high-spirited small talk that I dread. Or the general feeling, possibly fallacious, that the other participants are better aware of their rightful position in the world. It may be ridiculous for me to think of myself as a figure of the periphery at any level, but I am often uncomfortable among men who look like they've been wearing ties since they were born, or women who ooze that same centripetal (western) cultural force in some less definable way. Whenever I find myself surrounded by those people, there is a slight sense of friction, a feeling that someone is subtly tampering with someone else's perceived universe. An invisible swordfight over cognitive maps of society.

I'm not going to wear a tie.

Ei se sauna vieläkään satuttais. Jos ottais vaikka nokoset korvikkeeksi.
9.2.04  
I like snow. This is not news, since I come from a relatively cold spot on earth. So today, when I went cross-country skiing on a different spot on earth which is slightly less cold on average, I thought to myself: snow is nice. I often tell myself to "simplify, simplify" according to the Thoreauvian tradition, and judging on the complexity level of this particular thought, I have got the message. Climbing a hill on all-weather rented skis - which, based on today's experience, I would prefer to call no-weather ones - I tasted that simple thought on my tongue and liked it. It makes more sense to me now than at the age of ten or twelve (when I routinely took part in every skiing race available in the vicinity of Ruovesi, Finland). I'm glad something does.

I've made friends with snow. It's a better friend than most people I know. To me, snow connotes warmth and safety; it is a blanket. People say snow is cold, but it makes excellent insulation. If you're not ready to take my word for it, ask the next ptarmigan (yes, I'm pretty sure this is a word) you happen to meet.

I like ice too. Ice is nice. This is not news either. Skating is fun. It's late. I'm done.

Olisipa nyt lämmin sauna.
8.2.04  
This is where the little human being starts to realise his true potential in resisting gravity. He is sure that one beautiful morning those wobbly legs are going to support his body in a vertical position. And that moment, he tells himself, may now be at hand. He fills his tiny lungs with oxygen, then abruptly breaths out. An inner pressure in the lower body requires release first. Despite a definite fast-developing and unpleasantly filthy sensation under the diaper, the prospect of success lures the baby into applying every single drop of muscle strength to raise the top of his head higher than ever before. Now, suddenly, it's all a matter of straightening out the knees! With supreme effort, the chubby thighs tighten to accomplish that very goal. The head is up! The arms flail slightly for a moment until balance is regained. This new beginning brings a victorious smirk on his plump face. He opens the straps of the diapers with a single deliberate tug, revealing some ugly matter to the world.

Tämä lienee kaikkien pienten ja vaatimattomien alkujen äiti.

Old Ones
helmikuuta 2004
maaliskuuta 2004
huhtikuuta 2004
toukokuuta 2004
kesäkuuta 2004
heinäkuuta 2004
elokuuta 2004
syyskuuta 2004
lokakuuta 2004
marraskuuta 2004
joulukuuta 2004
tammikuuta 2005
helmikuuta 2005
maaliskuuta 2005
huhtikuuta 2005
toukokuuta 2005
kesäkuuta 2005
heinäkuuta 2005
elokuuta 2005
syyskuuta 2005
lokakuuta 2005
marraskuuta 2005
joulukuuta 2005
tammikuuta 2006
helmikuuta 2006
maaliskuuta 2006
huhtikuuta 2006
toukokuuta 2006
kesäkuuta 2006
elokuuta 2006
syyskuuta 2006
lokakuuta 2006
joulukuuta 2006
tammikuuta 2007
helmikuuta 2007
huhtikuuta 2007
elokuuta 2007

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