Working on Paul Auster, one has to get used to outrageous examples of chance and coincidence. And then they occur in one's own life. Of course. I have to write this down before I forget. Those who want to know why Auster considers wild strokes of chance a major part of reality, check out the real-life anecdotes in The Red Notebook (also available as part of The Art of Hunger). I must admit his stories are still way better (= more unbelievable) than this one of mine.

Last week, I attended a seminar where the dissertations of us doctoral candidates were scrutinized. One of the commentators was a professor from Denmark, an expert on American lit, who has taught in UCLA for several years and also works in American Studies. She had heard where I live and started asking questions about Uganda, revealing that her sister also resides in Kampala. This, I thought, was already quite a coincidence, since the Nordic population in Uganda is very limited in size.

I told her about Kaija working for the WFP. She immediately had that "are you kidding" expression on her face. So does her sister's husband, she said. Small world, I thought, and left it at that.

Later, I asked Kaija whether she knew of any Danes working for the WFP in Kampala. No, she did not. When I told her about the professor, she remembered that the Country Director, an American, has a Danish wife. She must be the sister. I had heard about him and seen his photo in newspapers several times myself, and once last winter we saw the whole family dining in an Italian restaurant that we, along with other mzungus, frequently visit. It all came back to me now.

But there was more. Don't you remember, Kaija asked. She had told me about it last winter. Once she had chanced upon the Country Director in a queue, and they had started talking. He had asked what her husband did, and she had told him I'm working on a Ph.D in contemporary American literature. Funny coincidence, he had said; his wife's sister just happened to work in the same field.

And so it also happened that the very same sister came to Finland to comment on my work, and I only understood the whole unlikely connection afterwards. 00:28

Our seminar room in Högsand five days ago. 22:54

Lots of domestic travelling in the last few weeks, especially the last ten days. Slept in a different town almost every night. I have five days left before my return to Uganda.

Kaija arrived from Japan on Thursday, 18th, and we stayed in Vantaa with Riitta and Timo. The next day, we picked up our Dutch friends Martin and Marieke from the airport and took them to Anu and Ilkka's place in beautiful Lempäälä, where we spent much of the weekend, enjoying sauna, Ilkka's expert cooking, beer & wine, and good company. On Saturday, my brother Timo ran his first marathon in Tre while the rest of us took it easy. Excellent weather (although certainly too warm for ideal running conditions).

Monday morning, I took the 7 a.m. train via Hki and Karjaa to Lappohja (near Hanko), where our grad school met for a two-day summer seminar. It was interesting to have academic sessions on sand dunes by the beach. The first day ended with sauna of course, beer & wine, songs in Finnish, English, Irish, Spanish, French, and Russian - and the inevitable anecdotes and (dirty) jokes. As the youngest of the by then (in)famous Three Markkus, I found it proper to provide my own modest contribution.

On Tuesday, I got a ride to Helsinki, where Kaija and I met some more friends. Wednesday evening we drove to Turku to meet more people and returned to Tampere on Thursday. Yesterday included sauna at Panu and Anni's place and a final night out before I took Kaija to the airport today. Now it's suddenly so very quiet in this little apartment. 20:24

I learned a new word today: jingoism. I definitely should have used it in the post on nationalism below. The mere existence of all these nearly synonymic -isms (chauvinism, nationalism, jingoism; the more positive patriotism; and their political expressions hawkism and militarism) just prove the centrality of the nation-based emotional framework in human experience. History suggests that this is not a very good thing.

I think we should blame it on the cavemen. If they had figured out a way to keep their bloody tribe together, we might not have to worry about any of this. 12:57

The flags are out. Somehow this same stadium accommodated twice this number of people in the 1952 Olympics. 02:01

Catherine Ndereba's private rituals after the marathon. She stayed like this, almost immobile, for several minutes. Praying, I reckon. 01:52

So I thought I should at least try to recreate a part of what I wrote into thin air yesterday.

The World Champs made me think of the character and force of patriotism. In a sports event, I have never heard noise as loud as that produced by the crowd on Saturday when Tommi Evilä (Tampere rules!) took the only Finnish medal of the games (see clip of Heike Drechsler interviewing him). I believe the concrete structures of the stadium were shaking. There are two main reasons for the overwhelming response: the huge disappointment over Tero Pitkämäki's failure to win the javelin the previous Wednesday, and the immense historical importance of athletics for the (self-)image of this country. Chris Turner has written a nice English summary of that background.

Patriotism, though, differs from nationalism. To me, 30,000 people yelling for Evilä on Saturday, as the skies darkened above us, exemplified healthy patriotism. Because of this collective zeal, all the other competitors also received a lot of support, and they seemed to appreciate it. If the crowd had started booing at Evilä's rivals - which, to be fair to the tradition of fair play in Finnish sport spectatorship, was quite inconceivable - they would have expressed nationalism in a sick way.

Nationalism, of course, is no stranger to track and field athletics. Sometimes it has lead to outright cheating, even if we ignore doping and, especially, the legendary East German he-women and such specimens as Jarmila and Flo-Jo. Experts still joke and talk about events occurring at the 1980 Moscow olympics. Deliberate mismeasurements in the discus, unfair red flags in the long jump, the stadium gates oddly opening whenever a Soviet athlete was about to throw the javelin... these are an endless source of anecdotes. As is the infamous Evangelisti case from the 1987 worlds in Rome, apparently engineered by the late Berlusconi-style IAAF mafioso Primo Nebiolo. Other famous cheaters, such as my favourites Stella Walsh and Fred Lorz, may not have had any nationalist motivations.

Such foul play is comically sad, but still nationalism is easier to accept in sport than in gun-toting politics, where people regularly die because of it. For the same reason, I can't help feeling it is easier to accept in a small country than in a superpower. Finland and Estonia, albeit undoubtedly patriotic peoples, are unlikely to get too imperialistic and start invading countries. There seems to be a theoretical consensus that offensive wars, or unprovoked invasions, cannot be legitimate expressions of patriotism. They are fuelled by imperialist nationalism, and the public understands this. Therefore, the lack of provocation needs to be hidden and the invasion presented as a defensive measure and an act of philanthropy. This is a simple rhetorical trick. Stalin set out to "liberate" Finland in the Winter War (1939-40); Saddam set out to "liberate" Kuwait in 1990; Bush set out to "liberate" Iraq in 2003. Till the end, Soviet historiography insisted that Finland started the Winter War; till the end, American right-wing mythmakers will insist that Iraq had both WMD and something to do with 9/11; till the end, the same conservative yes-men will present Hiroshima and Nagasaki as acts of charity.

Past conflicts present the hardest challenges for anyone trying to avoid overtly nationalist attitudes. Objectivity seems to downplay the sacrifices of one's dead compatriots. Most Americans whose grandfathers died on Iwo Jima would be hard-pressed to accept the brutal terrorist nature of the atomic bombs. The pressure towards nationalism is probably even stronger when considering a purely defensive battle fought to preserve a country's independence. I know it was impossible not to feel slightly patriotic while listening to my grandfathers wild stories about the frozen hell that was the Winter War. For a balanced view of that conflict, however, it's not enough to remember the 26,662 Finnish soldiers who died. Specifically, one should acknowledge that the greatest human tragedy in that war was Stalin's decision to send masses of ill-prepared Soviet boys north to die in the Finnish forests. Nobody knows how many of them got killed: one Russian source says "only" 126 875, Finnish estimates usually double that figure, and Nikita Khrushchev spoke of as many as a million. In any case, as one of their generals reportedly commented afterwards, the Russians did win just enough territory (10 % of Finland) to bury their dead. If that taught anyone anything, hopefully it was the fact that invading sovereign and patriotic countries is usually a bad idea. They tend to have little desire to be liberated.

I'm not sure there's a point to all this. After all, circumstances make it impossible for lots of people nowadays to feel patriotic toward any country. What this does reveal is that I am confirming at least two stereotypes: one on bloggers and another on Finns. Average bloggers' lack of argumentative coherence, we all know, can only be matched by their desperate need to find something to say. As for Finns, a rather bland but truthful joke will explain the "intro-retrospective" stereotype. This is a joke on national obsessions that I remember hearing from my history teacher some 15 years ago.

An American, a Frenchman, and a Finn were assigned to write a book on elephants, using whatever approach they found interesting.
The American immediately came up with a work called Making Profit out of Elephants.
The Frenchman wrote a poetic essay on the elephant's lovelife.
The Finn had trouble deciding but eventually produced a detailed study bearing the title The Elephant and the Finnish Winter War. 17:35

The most beautiful tower in the world. I spent three days in Helsinki watching the Athletics World Championships. 01:39

Help me. Some time 12 hours ago I started writing a post here. Forgot about it for several hours, with the window still open. Continued writing it, little by little, while doing other things.

Somehow I never saved a draft.

The post had grown huge, probably ten longish paragraphs. Ten minutes ago I was writing the sentence I decided would be the last. As you will have guessed by now, at that moment the whole thing evaporated irretrievably. I think I was closing some other window, and suddenly the blogger one was nowhere to be found. It was not my fault. It was the machine.

I feel like I have been robbed of a day. I need therapy. Help me. 01:03

... these "tests" at least offer something for the needy for a few short minutes. I know they were probably designed by and for American high school kids, but sometimes I don't have the energy to care.


This nerd test saw it appropriate to inform me that while I may not be a nerd, I am "definitely not hip either". I think I need to look up hip to judge whether this was an insult or a compliment.

Your Inner European is Swedish!

Relaxed and peaceful. You like to kick back and enjoy life.

My only defense for this one - indeed the only hope I have for maintaining a viable identity with a mental backbone - is the assumption that the test did not include Finnish as a result option. Well, at least I didn't hop south or east. I wonder how I would rationalize it to myself if I had turned out to be secretly Portuguese, or Irish, or Belarussian. A more serious and detailed test like this could be really fun.

Your IQ Is 135

Your Logical Intelligence is Genius Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius Your General Knowledge is Exceptional

21:45

I thought I'd write a real tall blog entry for a change, with links and something that at least remotely resembles argumentation. This post deals with Hitler. Godwin's Law does not apply because so far this is not a conversation.

In international politics, Hitler comparisons have become a wide-spread rhetorical device used against anyone whose actions could be seen as evil, intolerant, oppressive, or simply unpleasant. The emphasis has to be on the word evil, since clearly the Austrian vegetarian aquarellist has achieved a near monopoly in the cultural imaginary as a human incarnation of the Devil. Some voices occasionally refer to names such as Stalin, Pol Pot, or (most recently and slightly perversely) Bin Laden as alternatives, but none of them have quite accomplished comparable status despite venerable attempts by Uncle Joe and Osama at equally iconic facial hair formations. Hitler is the most efficient demon, who metonymically stands for the whole of the Nazi system; reversely, in this view the system, merely an extension of Hitler's evil, stands for the man.

The analogies drawn between the Nazis and others are slightly boring as functional arguments. They rarely add much to our understanding of the issues at hand. In my opinion, however, it is the customary responses to perceived hitlerization that prove the utter futility of such references even when they are made cautiously, for good reasons, and without direct accusations of the kind "he is like Hitler / they act like Nazis".

(a little interlude, and this is true: as I am writing this, the TV is on at the background. There's a British series on, and half a minute ago someone fired a shot at trees, shouting "They are the squirrel Nazis!" That caught my attention. Apparently it was a question of preference between red and gray squirrels. So the analogy is not even limited to humans.)

If a piece of text contains either of the words Nazi and Hitler, its reader sees nothing else. If these words are spoken in public, the audience hears nothing else. They are like bright deathly white stars whose glow hides their immediate context. Any reference to anything connected to them, however simple or indirect or constructive, seems to be interpreted through the reductio ad Hitlerum approach.

A few years ago, Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs Erkki Tuomioja criticised some attitudes within the Israeli government towards the Palestinian people (see one newspiece here and another here), saying that some of these stances reminded him of the kind of discrimination that Jews themselves suffered from in the 1930s. As far as I know, he mentioned neither Hitler nor Germany, but one could infer that the reference might be to events such as Crystal Night and related rascist developments in the Third Reich - the making-life-hard approach that was at the time referred to as terrorism (now, strangely, it is often thought that states can only be victims of terrorism, not its perpetrators).

There is no doubt that Dr. Tuomioja is more straight-spoken than your average politician. In any case, he knows his history, and the comparison only dealt with the decade preceding WWII and the atrocities of Hitler's Final Solution. However, the fierce response treated Tuomioja's statement as if he had accused Israel of Holocaust. Among others, Professor Efraim Karsh rebuked the statement, taking it out of its context and throwing in the normal allusions to death camps, gas chambers, and genocide.

I know Israel is a special case in a number of ways: Jews have a certain near-legitimate monopoly on touchiness. Any criticism of the Israeli government or actors close to it is automatically seen as antisemitism and irresponsible endorsement of past and present wrongs. So if the criticism refuses to perform the reductio ad Hitlerum, the response never does. But in the Hitler category of monster allusion, other targets are almost as sensitive as Israel. American senator Dick Durbin recently experienced the same kind of "concentrated" reaction to his words on Guantanamo. In 2003, German Justice Minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin had to resign after reportedly commenting on American warmongering by saying that "Bush wants to distract attention from his domestic problems. That's a popular method. Even Hitler did that". That is quite far from calling Bush Hitler. Actually, the reaction to her statement is a rare genuine example of reductio ad Hitlerum, where any alleged connection to the Führer is seen as a brutal insult. Nothing in the three short sentences she uttered is untrue. The problem was that the two proper names occured too close to each other. On the other hand, by now such comparisons between the two imperialist leaders have become such a commonplace that the White House hardly has time to react to them all.

Let me reveal something horrible about myself. I have a lot in common with Hitler. I like sports and want my compatriots to do well. I greatly admire Leni Riefenstahl's movies. I even speak some German. I must be a bloody monster. Please lock me up. 23:49

Summer nights create strange thoughts. Earlier tonight I saw a little piece of TV entertainment dealing with the Swedish language, and a moment after that I was examining the etymology of one of the most famous words of the English language. I mean, of course, fuck (sorry, asterisks are taboo on my blog). It's amazing how consistently a word this old - used in English for at least 500 years and probably much longer - could remain virtually banned for such a long time. The Online Etymology Dictionary says fuck did not enter dictionaries until 1965.

Nothing is more refreshing than a modest daily dose of obscenity, don't you think? The story continues as a collection of fun little anecdotes :

In 1948, the publishers of "The Naked and the Dead" persuaded Norman Mailer to use the euphemism fug instead. When Mailer later was introduced to Dorothy Parker, she greeted him with, "So you're the man who can't spell 'fuck' " [The quip sometimes is attributed to Tallulah Bankhead]. Hemingway used muck in "For whom the Bell Tolls" (1940). The major breakthrough in publication was James Jones' "From Here to Eternity" (1950), with 50 fucks (down from 258 in the original manuscript). Egyptian legal agreements from the 23rd Dynasty (749-21 B.C.E.) frequently include the phrase, "If you do not obey this decree, may a donkey copulate with you!" [Reinhold Aman, "Maledicta," Summer 1977]. Intensive form mother-fucker suggested from 1928; motherfucking is from 1933. Fuck-all "nothing" first recorded 1960. Verbal phrase fuck up "to ruin, spoil, destroy" first attested c.1916. A widespread group of Slavic words (cf. Pol. pierdolić) can mean both "fornicate" and "make a mistake." Flying fuck originally meant "have sex on horseback" and is first attested c.1800 in broadside ballad "New Feats of Horsemanship."

So today's popular discourse of sexual heroism has replaced the horse with a plane, and it seems imagination has certainly not increased in all other relevant areas either. Somehow those legal agreements from ancient Egypt sound much more morally binding than ones written in convoluted modern language.

Anyhow, what made me look into this was the Swedish word slöfock, 'a lazy or slow person, sluggard, slouch". The first part, slö, means "indolent, apathetic". Fock stems from the verb focka, which used to denote a brisk to-and-fro movement. No wonder, then, that the noun came to refer to the male organ.

The very common and versatile Swedish word fack, of course, despite its pronunciation being virtually identical to the English fuck, means nothing of the kind. I don't have much information on the precise customary usage of slöfock in Swedish, but I doubt that all users of the term are aware that they are in fact talking about a drooping penis. 13:00