I feel morally obligated to provide this link for three reasons:

1. Because someone has to make an effort to reduce the sales of crap. As The Absolute Law Concerning Popular Music and Market Economy stipulates, roughly ninety-five per cent of all albums released are crap.
2. Because, for those of you who don't usually listen to anything this metallic, it's still not too late to be reborn.
3. Because they still feed us lies from the tablecloth.

P.S. Keep the volume on, preferably fairly high. 00:11

Suvi suloinen jo joutui. Armas aika. 09:31

I signed up for a half marathon a few days ago, with three weeks left for preparation. Objective: to stay within ten minutes of the time I ran three and a half years ago (1.16,35). I was in OK shape then, but this course is less hilly, so the goal sounds realistic. 1.26,35. I've run a whole marathon at that pace without much special training. But fact is I am in worse shape now than ever in the past 15 years. Sad.

The life of the heart shouldn't be going downhill at 31 years of age. I mean it in two radically different senses (which for me, however, have been practically interchangeable). To remember the heart beating only once in two seconds, like a big organic bass drum...

BOOM! ............................... BOOM! .................................. BOOM! ................................. BOOM!

(I really don't know how to convey the real heart sound in written English - BOO-BOOM?)

A unique feeling. My resting heart rate, 45 at age 14, reached the all-time low of 31 (dear friends, don't try that at home) in July 1998, when I was 24 and running new personal bests in middle distance races. It must be back in the neighbourhood of 45 by now. 21:33

Yesterday, based on a comment I received while giving a paper a week ago, I was trying to figure out whether Auster's In the Country of Last Things is an epistolary novel. I went hunting for Janet Altman's book Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form in the library, and it turned out to be one of the ghost books (I've come across several in recent years) that exist on the catalog but not on the shelf. Most of these cases are probably due to misplacement, which basically amounts to the same thing as having the copy burned.

In mild frustration, I spent the better part of the next few hours working on something else: summarising a book of semiotic analysis on the literary representation of space, analysing Beckett's brand of nihilism, meditating on the strange interdependence of perfectionism and insecurity in the work of writing (Beckett again: "No sooner is the ink dry than it revolts me"). While browsing the list of Rodopi's publication series and downloading a few obscure but useful articles, I came across an interesting journal: Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society. Having just returned from Uganda, the name of the journal strikes me as a brilliant metaphor. Let me quote the editors:

Matatu is animated by a lively interest in African culture and literature (including the Afro-Caribbean) that moves beyond worn-out clichés of ‘cultural authenticity’ and ‘national liberation’ towards critical exploration of African modernities. The East African public transport vehicle from which Matatu takes its name is both a component and a symbol of these modernities: based on ‘Western’ (these days usually Japanese) technology, it is a vigorously African institution; it is usually regarded with some anxiety by those travelling in it, but is often enough the only means of transport available; it creates temporary communicative communities and provides a transient site for the exchange of news, storytelling, and political debate.

After breathing out the scholarly fumes of the matatu, I discovered that I have been writing about atopia in one of the original meanings of utopia. Thanks, Thomas More. On to other things.

Eventually, I did come back to the original question on Auster and epistolarity. According to a secondary source, Altman defines the epistolary genre in part through reciprocity. The anticipation of a reply, of the receiver and the writer swapping roles in the future, belongs to the basic premises of letter writing. In one sense, it occurred to me, the letter resembles the gift as defined by Derrida; it always presupposes a level of exchange. In Auster, although the letter is framed as an act of communication, the potential for a reply seems nonexistent. The act is doomed to be a monologue. Therefore the epistolary novel, declared a dead genre long ago anyhow, hardly offers a very relevant frame of reference.

Glad I got that settled. Makes a decent footnote.

Post Scriptum: Why on earth would anyone want to bring productivity-based thinking into the academia? The annual number of degrees does not say much, really. They would have to count the words and assess their quality one by one. 10:01

When I went to rent myself a parking spot for the summer this morning (something I have never before even imagined doing - how the heck did I become a private car user?), I encountered another symptom of a nationwide obsession. For the last ten years, it has been clear that whatever task the common Finn is given, he or she will prefer to perform it using a cell phone. Apparently, there is something suspicious about tasks (such as chopping wood) that resist the utilisation of mobile technology.

I must admit, though, that this particular application is pretty handy: the door of the ramp leading to the basement parking lot opens with a free phone call to a machine (which recognises the tenants' numbers). With the speed dial function, I can now open the door by pressing two buttons on my känny while approaching the last street corner. The only problem, in principle, seems to be that the law prohibits handling a cell phone while driving. Maybe these new applications will result in an additional clause.

So far, if a quick web search tells the truth, the technology is not used much outside Tampere. There's practically no info available in English. The office of the original developer seems to be downstairs in this same building. 17:15

Six days ago, Kaija and I took a taxi home from a restaurant in Kampala. The taxi was unofficial, unmetered, at least twenty years old, and in need of immediate retirement. It creaked and puffed and whistled as we negotiated the potholes; the doors felt and sounded like they could fall off any minute; the tyres felt nearly empty; none of the lights or indicators worked properly. The driver signalled turns by waving from his window. The bottom of the car got stuck once on 8th Street, at the spot where there is no street to speak of - just rough terrain and enormous holes. The planned journey was only about seven or eight kilometres, but where it was going to end seemed anything but certain. We finally limped up to Tank Hill, paid with exact amount because local taxi drivers never admit to having change, and walked down the dark street to our house, where electricity was also off. Lit some candles, watched the armed night guard fall asleep on the lawn.

Yesterday at 11.30 p.m., upon leaving the terminal at Helsinki-Vantaa, I joined a two-hundred metre taxi queue, which dissolved in about five minutes as dozens of big brand-new cabs kept collecting customers at an almost miraculous speed. My driver was from the city and did not know the Vantaa street address I gave him, so he entered the details on the driving computer and followed gps-based instructions. After 15 minutes of smooth black pavement, we watched the green spot marking the car converge with the black spot marking the destination on the computer screen, as he parked in front of Kaija's sister's mailbox. I could have paid with any card but chose a fifty-euro bill, and he promptly dug out the change.

Conclusion 1. As much as I sometimes make a point of expressing something akin to cultural relativism, it is hard not to feel momentary exhilaration when things suddenly work. I'm writing this in an apartment which may have never experienced a power cut, on a net connection which I set up after receiving the necessary TCP/IP settings in a text message from a person responsible for it - only a few minutes after I asked for them. Maybe I am getting old, but I like the ease, especially in technical/practical stuff such as transportation and communication.

Conclusion 2. I am convinced that the culture shock is generally a lot bigger when you travel in this direction. First-world people going to third-world countries are almost always well prepared, using the available sources of information and guidance to adapt to different circumstances. 19:11

Finland. Monday. 09:28

Serengeti 09:08

Kaija and I just made an eventful road trip to Kenya and Tanzania. Almost two thousand kilometres on all kinds of roads. The plan was to be back on Monday evening, but as expected, not everything went as planned. For one thing, we saw how big Lake Victoria really is. It took us two days, mostly on well-maintained roads, merely to drive to the other side. Here’s what happened. This is a long story.

Day 1.

We start off around two o’clock on Friday by sitting in the Kampala traffic jam for half an hour. Once the road clears a bit, we eventually cover the first 80 km to Jinja in about two hours and continue slowly towards the Kenyan border, zigzagging among the potholes. The road to Bugiri is in horrible condition; hopefully the apparently omnipresent road works will have an effect in the near future. From Bugiri to the border, it’s as smooth as the best European highway (EU money, maybe?). It’s hard not to pay attention to the immense contrast between the wide paved lanes and the buildings (clay huts, board shacks) lining them. The road construction has given local teenagers an incentive for an interesting pastime: they stand on the road, waving genuine-looking red flags and pretending to be authorized workers. If a car stops – as we do once – their opening line is a subtle “Give me some money”. It seems to be a full-time job for these boys, who apparently have nothing else to do.

Entering the rainy border area in Busia, the car is immediately surrounded by a gang of men fiercely waving colourful papers and demanding to see the photocopy. It takes us a while to find out that they want a copy of the car’s logbook (equivalent to a registration document), and we only have the original. After parking the car, we try to proceed on our own, but the wolves keep following us and demanding the photocopy. They introduce themselves as “agents”, offer suspicious identity cards as proof of their honesty, and laugh when we say we can deal with the papers by ourselves. Eventually, as the customs officer seems reluctant to talk to us otherwise, we make the mistake of letting one of them take a copy and fill out a form for us. Now he is in charge. We fill out several forms, wait for half an hour for a compulsory but useless vehicle insurance document, show our passports and driver’s licenses to several people, and repeat roughly the same process on the Kenyan side. It’s already dark when we can continue. Our little helper wants a huge “service fee” and gets it because we don’t want to argue any more and don’t even remember the correct value of the Kenyan Shilling. Judging on the size of his belly, he has cheated a lot of other people too.

Afterwards, we draw some conclusions. The only aim of these border wolves is to convince innocent travellers that the customs and immigration bureaucracy is impossible to handle without help. They, not the authorities, need the infamous photocopy to work smoothly. They work outside the system, but the corrupt system enables their work and even encourages it. We decide not to accept any help from people not wearing uniforms from now on.

The night drive to Kisumu takes two hours. We check in at the Imperial Hotel and have a late dinner. We do this in our travelling gear only to realise later that neither shorts nor sandals are allowed in the restaurant.

Day 2.

It is a bright morning. The beautiful countryside scenery changes fast. Everything goes well until Kisii, where we take the wrong road, losing about 45 minutes while driving back and forth. Towards Tanzania, the landscape turns more and more majestic. The next two days often remind us of the two days we spent driving across Arizona a year ago: open spaces, enormous boulders of rock, large flat areas, mountains in the distance. But first, there is another border to tackle in Isenbania. Fortunately, there are fewer wolves and raindrops around this time, which makes the experience more pleasant if not any less confusing or time-consuming. Kaija starts to develop a fast routine for filling out forms and lines in huge books with the car details. There are no computers. The Kenyan immigration man convinces us that getting a return transit visa in Masai Mara on the way back will not be a problem. We visit five or six offices on the Tanzanian side alone before the last gate finally opens. The visas are supposed to be valid for three months, but after hearing our plans for a quick return the officer only gives us two days on the stamp. So we got about two per cent of what we paid for.

There are police checkpoints every once in a while both in Kenya and Tanzania. Although usually the officers merely gesture us forward, a few times they demand to see documents or our bags. At the back of the RAV4, we also have a jerry can of petrol as a precaution, and a box of school supplies for Mwanza. Jambo. Asante sana.

The road is in excellent condition. Lake Victoria offers us occasional glimpses of its bright surface on the right as we speed along towards south and then southwest. Suddenly, the immense grass plain on the left is filled with zebras – we have hit Serengeti. The surreal feeling from the sight of dozens of striped horses is boosted by the herds of cattle on the other side of the road. This is where the wild and the tame meet, divided by two lanes of tarmac.

The Ugandan phone operator Mango offers no roaming in Tanzania, so we have no way of informing our only contact, Joseph, of our progress. At 6.30 p.m., we park the car in front of the building which houses the Tampere—Mwanza co-operation project at the city centre. The door is locked. We have about half an hour of daylight left, and Kaija wants to check up on a tree she planted in 2003 at a nearby plant nursery. (It might be that one, she says. Or maybe the one behind it.) Then we start looking for a phone. Half a minute after leaving the nursery, however, someone calls Kaija’s name. It’s Hassan, who visited us in Tampere last year along with Joseph. He simply happened to drive past and see us examining the trees. Understandably, he is astonished. Busy with arranging an international football tournament, he had no idea we were coming to Tanzania. He phones Joseph, whom we soon join in a nearby pizzeria for dinner. After checking into Hotel New Mwanza, I have the opportunity to experiment on a couple of local beer brands as we visit two bars. In the latter, Rumours, a few local girls are not wearing much on their gravity-defying curves. They look like regulars and professionals.

Day 3.

Joseph has decided to join us in Serengeti and get a bus back when we reach Kisii. After we fill the tank and visit the office to drop off the school supply box, we encounter an unexpected delay in the form of a May 1st parade that blocks the main streets completely. It’s almost ten by the time we begin retracing our path northward. I’m at the wheel, anticipating a lot of narrow dirt roads once we enter the park for real.

Entrance is thirty dollars per person plus the car, which Joseph talks through the gate for the lower price of a local vehicle. This is the first example of his remarkable talent as a jovial spokesman (several more to follow). The plan is to drive through both Serengeti and Masai Mara today, stopping at park headquarters in Seronera first to deal with the paperwork for crossing the border. We start off spotting lots of wildebeests, other antelopes, gazelles, impalas, baboons, and a few ostriches within the first hour. Despite the rainy season and the lack of an open roof, the grass is not too tall, and we can easily take pictures from inside the car. Later on in the day, we get some excellent giraffe shots.

The driving remains relatively easy all the way to Seronera. Once we get there, however, the real problems begin. The immigration officer is nowhere to be found. We drive back and forth in the area with a ranger, visiting houses and barracks and information centres, to no avail. This means that we cannot continue northward today, since rumour has it that there is no officer at the border. Finally we are promised that the guy will be around tomorrow at seven a.m. at the centre, even though working hours only start at eight. Content with this, Kaija and I take accommodation at the Wildlife Lodge, and Joseph stays at a cheaper option nearby. Although the sunset turns out less than magnificent, the Lodge’s observation deck provides a wonderful panorama over the plains. The dinner buffet is just as wonderful after the long day in the car. Rock hyraxes (unbelievably, these little fellas are related to elephants!), monkeys, lizards, and mongooses run freely about the premises. There are always several pairs of eyes fixed on you, wherever you go.

Day 4.

On the way to our early breakfast at 6.30, we are greeted by a group of giraffes slowly waving their spectacular necks among the bushes about 50 metres from the terrace. There’s still a glimmer of hope about getting back to Uganda by the end of the day, so we want to get going fast. Joseph soon extinguishes that hope. He has been partying with the immigration officer last night and says the man will not be available until ten past eight, when we can pick him up at his apartment. So in the meantime we take a miniature game drive along the river, seeing a few hippos and a tourist balloon, the latter drifting across the sky.

The officer has a severe hangover after Joseph drags him out of bed. We take him to the office and get the necessary stamps but hear more bad news. Contrary to what we’d been told, we won’t get a transit visa for Kenya in Masai Mara. There are no Kenyan immigration people there, never have been, the tired man informs us, so we would have to get a visa later in Kisumu (or perhaps even Nairobi, which is out of the question). What he doesn’t say – at least not in English – is how we are supposed to enter Kenya without a visa.

Driving northward, the space under the RAV4’s floor proves insufficient. Although I try to keep one side on top of the sand bank at the centre of the narrow path, occasionally the stones scrape the bottom, making nasty sounds. The animals are great: I see my first lion, turtles on the road, a flock of elephants in the distance, and more giraffes. After a few hours, we reach the park border, still in Tanzania. One of the guys talks a lot to Joseph in Swahili about what might happen if we try to enter Kenya into Masai Mara without a visa, but I only hear one phrase: “serious offence”. The man also suggests that some dollar bills might make a difference.

From now on, Joseph takes care of all our business in Swahili, making friends first and then tackling the issues. We soon reach the Kenyan border and present our dilemma. There is a lot of talk, but the action boils down to us paying twenty dollars extra to get inside the country. Despite the bribe, they cannot give us visas, but they won’t arrest us either, which they first threatened to do. We are on our own, with a chance to explain things again in Kisumu, where we would find an immigration office.

In Masai Mara, we see the black marks of the rainy season: the car almost sinks into the dark mud a few times, miraculously creeping back onto dry ground. I’ve been driving for one and a half days now, and the mud baths provide the biggest stress so far. We simply cannot afford getting stuck (and it would be dangerous too). Often there are several route options, and I regularly need to go into reverse to find the best option. The first 15 km are the worst, then things ease up a bit. We enjoy the rift valley scenery and see several giraffes and elephants (one of whom starts running towards the Toyota fast enough to make me step on the gas pedal) and a few crested cranes (Uganda’s national bird) and jackals, plus lots of warthogs. The park boundary comes in sight around 2.30. We exit without problems.

Unfortunately, things take a bad turn again. As we reach the summit of the ridge, it starts raining. We have chosen a road which seems to take us to a paved one faster than the other option, but now we still have a long distance to cover on unpredictable sandy materials. For a long while, everything seems fine, and I can drive safely at a decent speed although it rains heavily. Then, at about 3.15, the car suddenly turns into a boat. The solid road simply ends in an instant, and the vehicle starts sliding without control on a thick layer of red, watery mud as slippery as ice. There is nothing for the tyres to bite into. I can keep the car on the road for a while by keeping the front wheels in the right direction, but the friction stays at zero. Then we just skate off the road to the left, downhill, front first. Kaija screams, Joseph howls, I don’t know what I do. I see a solid-looking fence approaching a fraction of a second before we hit it. The car continues moving uphill, crawling through the bushes back onto the road, where it stops, pointing in the direction we came from. Masai shepherd children with their cows start gathering around us as we inspect the damages. One headlight is gone as well as a panel of the coating from above the left front wheel. It hangs partly loose, pointing to the side like a torn silver wing. There’s a muddy opening in the bushes, a new driveway for someone who does not own a car.

The car still works, so we get moving again. Even at walking speed, the Toyota slides sideways on the mud, but I somehow stay on the road. After a hundred metres, there’s another car in the ditch, with several men pushing it back onto the road. Another few hundred metres, and the mud disappears: there’s a solid surface to drive on again. Everything is flooded, with water streaming across the road and gathering in pond-size puddles on both sides. The rain continues for the rest of the day.

After two hours or so of extremely cautious driving, we reach the paved road and find a service station, where our silver wing is removed. I put it in the trunk. We’re fairly close to Isenbania and decide to drive there for the visas and to drop Joseph off instead of continuing north to Kisumu right away. We limp to the border, three illegal immigrants in a grotesque-looking car. Joseph does the talking again. The Kenyan officer won’t give as entry stamps or visas unless we have a Tanzanian exit stamp from that border station. He says the hung over guy in Seronera should never have let us continue to the border through Serengeti. So we walk across the border, explain the same thing to the Tanzanians, and, thanks to Joseph’s Swahili rhetoric, receive our invaluable stamps (accompanied by heavy sighs). Now we have officially exited Tanzania twice without ever arriving in Kenya. The rest goes smoothly: we say a happy good bye to Joseph, wade through a few more offices on the Kenyan side, and start driving north.

Somewhere during the additional three and a half very stressful driving hours through darkness and rain to Kisumu, a piece of sugarcane hits us on the roof with a loud bang. I’ll spare you the details. The conclusion to an absolutely outrageous day: another night in the Kisumu Imperial.

Day 5.

Nothing much: 300 more kilometres and one more border where we manage to remain so rude and determined that no wolf gets a grip on us. Arrival in Kampala at three.

Lessons? The essence of what is often called African time: no western-style schedule will hold because one or two links of the chain will always be missing. The essence of information in this part of the world: one cannot assume that people are telling the truth, or that they know the truth, or that the truth exists. The essence of roads in Africa: no assumptions whatsoever can be made. 16:41