Utopian

Oh god, so sorry. It really has been a while. I just started studying literature at university, and between one thousand pages a week, obligatory social commitments, and hangovers, I have been busy. I love it though. It’s a strange feeling waking up and being psyched about going to class. I think I’m nauseating my peers.

Anyway, enough with the digressions! This summers I’ve had quite the utopian (or dystopian, whichever way you look at it) focus in my reading. I read 1984 by George Orwell, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (these two are generally taken to be the creme de la creme of zukunft-angsty litterature) and to throw something else in the mix Kallocain by Karin Boye.

First of all, I’ll stress greatly that the focus of my comparisons is longevity. I have the distinct luxury of actually living in what, by these three authors, would be considered the future. It’s like a cooking show – I “cheated a little”. So with that in mind, I thought that, since I am in no way a literary expert, I’ll use what I know. Which is my own time.

I’ll start flat-out by saying that the one which is the most popular, 1984, was in fact my least favorite (look at me being avant-gardy). There are several reasons for this. I’ll start off by saying that obviously, this is a remarkable book, mostly in terms of the amount of imagination, compared to when it was written. But it has severe lacks when being read by a contemporary reader. I’ll list some of them here (since starting university I have come to appreciate lists greatly).

• Winston’s tedious personality. I’ll just come right out and say it: that is a man of very few dimensions. Besides being extremely self-absorbed, his reactions to his surroundings never even borders on interesting reflection. He thinks exactly as we readers think: “oh no, everyone is being CCTV’d, that is horrible, HOW can someone live like this!?”
• Sexual suppression. This development of a society suppressing sexual desire and means of self-realisation in order to control people is not something that is used anywhere in the world. One might come up with examples like strict Arabic countries but I must stress that sexual pleasure plays a huge part in Islam – as soon as you are married. Which, although I find it strange, still recognises people’s instinctive need to get down and dirty once in a while. Suppressing this would not control people, it would just make them masturbate a lot.
• Winston’s relationship with Julia. Actually vaguely reminds me of Twilight. I sensed absolutely no chemistry, and the shared emotion was incredibly limited. Is this due to sexual suppression? Of course. Yet their conversations are totally uninteresting. Finding someone who shares your hate of an oppressive government will of course be freeing to Winston. But to us it is just yet another character who has the same basic reaction to totalitarianism as we do. Zzzzzz…..
• Big Brother and the internet. I know I am dancing the conga on the grave of a literary classic. And with the PATRIOT act, I certainly heard someone shout Big Brother all over the news. Which is true, with the development of technology, surveillance has become incredibly easy for governments to employ. The things not anticipated by 1984, though, is that it also made for quite a breakthrough in private use of computers and the internet. Do I blame Orwell for not guessing that the internet would exist? Of course not. But in terms of the novel’s historic longevity, thinking that new technology only falls in the hands of the government is a problem that makes the premise of this being our society difficult to swallow. There are no TV screens in our homes, we have largely resisted (even in Denmark, which in the minds of a lot of Americans is bordering on communism) governmental decrees in physical health etc. The Swedish (yes, we wave our flag loud and proud) development of the third way has largely abolished the idea of socialism in the Orwellian sense.
• Room 101. I’m sorry. But that was so lame. While I applaud the idea of capitalising on a human being’s biggest fear, choosing rats seems almost banal. While I may say that I am terrified of spiders, I am, after all, more terrified of being locked in a room while slowly going mad – which was already happening to Winston.
• Conclusion: (for you lazy ones). Main characters in the book lack personal depth. In the climactic scene in Room 101, which is supposed to unleash the horror of a totalitarian society while simultaneously showing us how you ultimately destroy and dehumanise a human being, Winston is put in a cage full of rats. I mean COME ON. Also, the way in which this society is constructed is described, yet the elaboration on WHY, exactly, no one resisted in the first place, is lacklustre to say the least. Consider the public outcry over CCTV. Consider the Arab Spring. People don’t stand idly by injustice. Unless they are given DRUGS, which leads me to….

Brave New World!

While being more satiric (and often hilarious), BNW’s deification of the materialistic (Henry Ford as a god, as well as multiple other hints throughout the book), is much more akin to how I see our society today. The idea of completely separating the joy of sex from the actual making of a baby is a stroke of genius that pervades through our lives. Sadly, the notion that third world countries is some sort of side show for us to be amazed and struck by is wide spread. Every year, thousands of young people travel to Africa to get themselves a good sense of poverty, before returning to their own life at home – according to themselves – completely transformed. One can only mourn the fact that ‘going home  to wealth and X-factor’, is not a possibility for actual Africans.

Now this one I really, really like (the French agree!). You know why? I’ll tell you why:

• Sex, drugs, and Rock’n'Roll! Nietzsche once said that ‘Religion is opium of the masses’. You know what’s better at pacifying us that religion? Actual drugs. I can’t imagine anything more perfect for inducing complete political inertia in youth than letting them have as much sex, as many drugs, and as much freedom as they could possibly want. Actually, it’s happening right now. I find the danger of people completely losing interest in anything but their own lives to be a far more imminent threat than people not reacting to totalitarianism in their own country. We have it so good that we don’t notice anything but ourselves.
• The peripheral characters. Lenina is perfect and interesting. She gives us a fantastic view of how a brain would work in someone who actually likes the dystopian society. Getting a view into a mind like that is, at least to us now, far more interesting than hearing about Winston, who agrees with us. How does a mind adapted to the idea of extreme social determinism work? Is it similar to how a mind, like the mind of your average American republican, can adapt to thinking that social inheritance is ‘fair’? I am baffled by it. Yet, BNW forces us to think about things we take for granted now (people can find our telephone numbers online, a lot of politicians thrive on blatant racism, etc). Are we even much better?
• Bernard Marx is an asshole. Winston, with a personality flat as a pancake, is strongly contrasted by Bernard Marx, who goes through a lot of personal stuff, transforms, and becomes the über-monster of the materialistic society: the person addicted to fame without being addicted to personal accomplishments.
• The Savage. The role of the savage is a brilliant way to create an outsiders view on society without ending up with an angry, bitter person like Winston. The savage, having heard raving tales of a place that is eerily close to our society, is struck by the completely shallow world he enters. Based only on joy and feeble, fleeting desires. The scene in which his mother dies is heartbreaking, and really shows the grittiest side of human suffering, and it forces you to ask yourself: is this book right? Would we be better off never experiencing this, but trading it in for never having true attachment. One wonders.
• The Last Speech by Mustapha Mond: This is what we lacked in 1984. An explanation for how this happened. And why it keeps happening.

I am, in short, far more scared by human desire than by human fear. Far more scared by passivity through lack of will to act, than through lack of ability. The last, after all, can be eradicated, as we have seen this very spring.

Lastly, I’ll give an honorary mention to Kallocain, which really impressed me. Here we have a ‘Reverse-Bernard Marx’, with a person who first relishes the totalitarian society, then realises its destructive effects. This is a strong reversal, and an interesting character development. The plot of the book is genius, and I can strongly recommend it. For anything, to hear a woman’s perspective for 5 consecutive minutes in the history of utopian literature.

So long, brethren, I have work to do!

 

 

Tragedies

There is no doubt that to most Scandinavians, be it Swedes, Danes or Norwegians, summer ’11, will carry a distinctly sad batch of emotions. While we are all trying to make sense of what happened (which is, of course, impossible), I can say nothing other than this summer, I have been very proud to be Scandinavian. We do not fight violence with more violence. We fight violence with freedom, love, and democracy. There will be no crusade setting out from our shores, there will be no hate, there will be no unnecessary dead at the hands of our soldiers.
We are free, democratic people, and we show now that we will continue to be.
While the American reaction of trying to pair a country (or a religion) together with arbitrary acts of mad men seem more understandable to us now, we will not succumb to this most banal human reflex. This was not a Christian act, although the perpetrator multiple times described himself as such. This reminds us to keep apart fundamentalism, and the acts done in its name, and peaceful belief. There will always be people with anger, violence, and contempt in their hearts, what ideology they subscribe to seems to be almost random.
We must remember, and criticize ourselves for how we treat Muslim terrorists. As soon as the news that this was a white, Norwegian man came out, psychologists were immediately summoned.
“What was his childhood like?”
I don’t remember anyone ever asking this question about a Muslim terrorist. It is easy to write someone off because we don’t understand them, like we have done with Muslims who “hate us” for more than a decade now. I hope this will make people think that “this man has as much to do with my beliefs, as a any Muslim has to do with Muhammed Atta”.

And last, but not least. Between January and June of this year, 1145 children in Kongo-Kinshasa have died of measles. 115000 are currently very ill, and many more will die. 78 people died in a plane crash in Morocco today. 3,7 million people (a third of the entire population) in Somalia are currently suffering from the worst famine in 60 years. Many of them will also die.

My thoughts go out, not only to the hundreds of family members and other loved ones of the killed in Norway, but to people who are dying everywhere. This summer we came to know what it’s like when so many people die at the same time, the number is almost impossible to understand. So many lives, not even lived. But we are fortunate, because we are strong. Out countries are built on love, on understanding. Let us remember the places where tragedies like this are the rule, not the exception.
Let us mourn the people who died too early this summer.

Strong is beautiful

Okay, I’m going to get femi on ya’ll now, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

So, every feminist and their mother have been losing their shit over the new WTA commercials featuring pro women tennis players in slow motion, hitting a ball really hard while they have a voice over of them saying something strong and cool. Here’s an example with Li Na:

The criticism from angry cookie-cutter feminists have been (roughly) what they always are.

“What is this over-sexing of the female body!? WE ARE NOT OBJECTS, MEAN PR-MEN! WE HAVE ACTUAL FEELINGS, AND JOBS, AND CELLULITE”

And yes, I have a job and cellulite, too. However, what pisses me off with the sexualisation of the female body in media is not the fact that it’s happening. I happen to like sexy women a lot. My problem is that all sexy women in media tend to look the same.

My thing is this: I’m not particularly tall. I don’t have a bone structure like Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, eyes like Adriana Lima, or legs like Freja Beha. That’s all very sad. What I do have, however, is a membership at a gym. And while yes, looking like Li Na doesn’t take 30 minutes a week for a month, it is far more attainable than stretching your legs out about 20 cm (trust me, I have tried).This is in fact attainable. So put down that bucket of KFC and listen for a sec.

While physically she is admirable in every way imaginable, this video to me also has a very strong emotional analogy. That of strong women.

While the female ideal of Europe ca. 1795 has changed, the idea behind the ideal has not. We like women who look like they don’t have to work, and therefore spend all their time on their bodies. In previous times that meant being chubby (or that’s what we’d called it today, I’m sure Boticelli had a better word) and pale, because you didn’t have to stand out in the sun, plowing the fields. This woman, like the ideal of today, is a lot of times a woman presented as weak, an object of desire with little personal will. Of course these women aren’t (and weren’t) that, but that’s how we’re supposed to perceive them. (The discrepancy between the model as an actual person and the image that is presented with her face on it is an entirely different debate.)  And that’s what I like about these commercials. These women aren’t stick-thin victims of and industry, they are strong fighters, setting an example, being independent, and yes, being sexy. Being sexy is not anti-feminist, rather the opposite, I find women in control of their own sexuality to be one of the most empowering things of all.

A lot of the criticism of things like these often stems from the idea that women (especially angry feminists with blogs), have a tendency to think that they’re the only women in the world who control their own will. That if a woman shows her butt in a video (like above), she be FORCED and COERCED into doing it. I’m sure this is the case with a lot of 15-year old models (who are being photographed by Terry Richardson), but these are grown women. I wish we would stop diminishing the power and will of other women in order to make it fit into our own ideas of structural male chauvanism. It’s just so tiring.

So ladies, applaud these strong, independent ladies, they are true role models – physically, as well as emotionally!

Summer Rain

There was a humid blanket on the heat today

Clocks

An article I read in the New York Review recently terrified fascinated me. It was by the HBIC Zadie Smith, of White Teeth fame, a commentary on a new installation of sorts. A 24 hour long film depicting time in movies (and real life, because something imitates something and all that). For every minute of the day, there was a new clip of someone taking a peek at their wrist watch, or saying “I’m in a hurry”, and the like. It made me think about what is real in a movie and what isn’t. Because, even though it’s fiction, it still happened at a real point in time. Imagine a kiss being filmed at 5 o’clock inside a studio. It is supposed to be evening in the scene, so it’s dark and artificial. But the fact remains that a kiss still happened at 5 o’clock, even if you didn’t (and by you I mean random actor or actress) ascribe a certain meaning to it.

Can we ever create something that is 100% artificial?

The thought process brought me further into these depths (I’ve been sunbathing a lot lying on my back, I can’t hold books so I’m confined to my own brain which, quite frankly, is mortifying) of art. Can we sing a song without in even the slightest way be affected by what it says? Total Eclipse of the Heart aside, I delved deeper into how we relate our “real” world to what is supposed to be a mirror of it.

I didn’t really get anywhere (that’s the thing with blogs, no demands on output but your own), but still, I can’t help but look for clocks in films, because that’s when it happened.

From Christian Marcley's "The Clock"

Obsessed with the flower setting

On my Canon EOS, there’s this little flower. If you turn it on, everything you shoot becomes artsy looking. Here, for example, are some things I shot in Greece. Look, it’s almost like I gave a fuck.

News on the walls of Delphi.

Conglomerate stone with shells in it. Greece, apparently, used to be covered with water. Hence the shells in the most random places. Like tops of mountains, or in your shoes. Here's an example from Olympia.

A window in the temple of Asclepios. He was the god of health and nurturing. His temple was what we would now refer to as a "Day time spa/night time brothel"

On My Way

Fun

There’s nothing quite like randomly inducing epilepsy attacks. It gives the day a feel of Grey’s Anatomy, and HOW could you ever tire from that tour de force of dramatic writing!?

My legs in a fashionista stance

Covert offences

Okay, I realize that this post is a little late compared to when all this happened, but my point still stands, and I haven’t really found anyone who thinks like I on this.

For a long while I have, quite frankly, had my knickers in a twist about censorship in America. I see the point that swearwords are bad, especially the ones targeting a group such as the N-word or the F-word (I can’t type them out, to me it’s offensive). So well, if they want to bleep them out, that’s fine. Honestly I think people know what they’re saying anyway, but that’s not the point. I have, for a long time, thought that censorship of words like fuck and shit, which children are exposed to anyway, misses the point.

Censoring these words give the impression that it’s easy to know if someone is being offensive or not, just listen to the words! If there’s a “fuck” in it, it’s probably offensive! Unfortunately, offensive sentences and positions are seldom gift-wrapped with a “shit” on top of them for you to notice them.

A couple of months ago, the conservative radio-shrink Dr. Laura was fired from her job. A person called her radio show complaining that she, a black woman, was experiencing racist name-calling from her husband’s, a white man, friends. Earlier in the conversation, Dr. Laura had said that she didn’t think stereotyping blacks was racist, because black people voted for Obama only because he was black.

She the proceeded to complain that black comedians were allowed to use racial stereotyping, but not whites. And that’s when she said “Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger.” (read the entire transcript here). She defended it by saying she was reclaiming her first amendment rights, but ultimately, she was fired.

My position is this: I haven’t heard much of Dr. Laura’s programmes. But I have, in research for this article, read some of her transcripts. Saying that racial stereotyping (She fondly remembers saying to her black bodyguard that “White men can’t jump”, so she wanted him on her basketball team.) isn’t racist, isn’t just wrong, it’s offensive as all hell.

She has had this programme for a number of years, surely answering questions on race relations and other inflammatory subjects. I simply refuse to believe that in all these years, she hasn’t said a single offensive thing. Here’s an example where she gives her vocal and ferocious support of an anti-abortion campaign showing dead fetuses on the side of trucks. That, to me, is incredibly offensive to a right women acquired in Roe v. Wade several decades ago. Yet, the idea of firing her isn’t even brought up, because there was no slur.

Offensive things are said everywhere, all the time. Seldom are they as easy to spot as a “fuck” in a Lil’ Wayne video. We have to keep our eyes open to it. Censoring moves focus from the meaning of a sentence to a simple word. It seems like a futile attempt at screening young people from offensive things. It doesn’t. They can turn on Fox News and listen to birthers, a movement that is fuelled on covert racism. That’s offensive.

Greece in two weeks