Frode Helland has written an analysis of Jan van Huysums blomsterstykke with the title Voldens blomster? Henrik Wergelands Blomsterstykke i estetikkhistorisk lys (Universitetsforlaget 2003). (The flowers of violence? Henrik Wergeland's Flower piece in light of history of aestethics). This new analysis of one of Wergeland's most important works has many strong points, particularly where Helland shows us the work's context and how it enters the greater discurse on the relation of poetry to painting and art to reality.
A couple of issues merit some discussion.
On page 158, Helland comments on the verse where the poem's "I" sees "deceased lovers' faces" in the flower painting. (A translator's note: the English word "lover" is not gender-specific, the original Norwegian text makes it clear that the faces are female). Helland immediately associates the modern connotations of the word "lover" and concludes that the painting reminds the speaker of prostitutes he has paid visits to.
However, in both English and Norwegian the word "lover" seems to have changed meaning over time - note for example how Dickens used the phrase "Little Dorrit's lover" about a boy who had a crush on "Little Dorrit" but never even dared tell her. This is clearly miles from modern usage. While sexuality has become less taboo and claimed its current mind share of the public discourse, the meaning "sex partner" has sort of taken over the word "lover" (with some help from D.H.Lawrence I guess). It is interesting to note that exactly the same shift of meaning has happened in Norwegian and English.
Of course Wergeland's usage of "lover" predates this development. Hence I doubt that the poet intended the interpretation Helland provides. For me this is simply a sort of "advance notice" of the "story in the story" and the tragic love affairs of the three women Narcissa, Klara and Katarina in the next part of the poem. In this context, "female lover" just means "woman who is in love".
I quite like Helland's interpretation of Blomsterstykket as a discurse on the violence art and its stylization, and to what extent the demands of form and style in art commits brutal crimes against life and reality. (Since I'm at the moment of writing in the middle of a dance piece rehearsal period with stiff muscles and aching bruises it would be hard to deny that processes of stylization can be quite violent.. Perhaps most in fields like dance and sports where the performers must adapt their own personal movements and body to the work.)
But Helland assigns the same function to all violence in the text. It looks like he believes Wergeland's message (though with some ambivalence) is that even war was necessary to create the piece of art, and thus even the sufferings of war are justified by the final artwork...
artistic creativity, motivation and destruction are connected. (...) violent crimes against innocent people are the foundations for art . (p. 172)
This means he misses a possible overall interpretation. Because another layer of this work discusses the relation between pain/suffering and art. Wergeland seems to explore the apparent paradox that a country which has been through a terrible civil/religious war, refines the peaceful, aestetic flower painting - and Wergeland reads a therapeutic effect which explains the paradox into the painting.
There are two paralell cases of violence in the poem. One is the war and the attack on the town, the other occurs when van Huysum takes old Adrian's flowers. This second case is explicitly justified by the "tear of forgiveness" at the end. Wergeland could be expressing the possible therapeutic effect of art, how it helps old Adrian to see the sufferings and sorrows the war inflicted on him transformed into a beautiful painting.
(Tue, 13 May 2008 01:06:10 +0200). ->>
I found the article learning to lie (printable version with less ads) very interesting - probably partly because it confirms some of my already held beliefs about how to bring up children. Here are some excerpts that struck me:
The average Pennsylvania teen was 244 percent more likely to lie than to protest a rule. In the families where there was less deception, however, there was a much higher ratio of arguing and complaining. The argument enabled the child to speak honestly. Certain types of fighting, despite the acrimony, were ultimately signs of respect-not of disrespect. But most parents don´t make this distinction in how they perceive arguments with their children. (...) Forty-six percent of the mothers rated their arguments as being destructive to their relationships with their teens. Being challenged was stressful, chaotic, and (in their perception) disrespectful. (...) But only 23 percent of the adolescents felt that their arguments were destructive. Far more believed that fighting strengthened their relationship with their mothers. "Their perception of the fighting was really sophisticated, far more than we anticipated for teenagers," notes Holmes. "They saw fighting as a way to see their parents in a new way, as a result of hearing their mother´s point of view be articulated."
And this:
"Many parents today believe the best way to get teens to disclose is to be more permissive and not set rules," Darling says. Parents imagine a trade-off between being informed and being strict. Better to hear the truth and be able to help than be kept in the dark. Darling found that permissive parents don´t actually learn more about their children´s lives. (...) Pushing a teen into rebellion by having too many rules was a sort of statistical myth.
Finally:
the type of parents who are actually most consistent in enforcing rules are the same parents who are most warm and have the most conversations with their kids," Darling observes. They´ve set a few rules over certain key spheres of influence, and they´ve explained why the rules are there. They expect the child to obey them. Over life´s other spheres, they supported the child´s autonomy, allowing them freedom to make their own decisions. The kids of these parents lied the least. Rather than hiding twelve areas from their parents, they might be hiding as few as five.
My own conclusions:
(Note though that lies and fantasy are distinct things. Saying "if you don't finish your food, your aunt won't come and visit you tonight" is probably a lie. Storytelling and fairytales is fantasy.)
(Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:38:01 +0200). ->>
Recently I was going to help a friend turn their small business website into a CMS-driven one, and I quite thoroughly explored OpenSourceCMS.com looking for a system that would meet the requirements.
Said requirements were roughly
To be honest, while I think the OpenSourceCMS site is a wonderful resource, I was disappointed with the quality of the featured systems. Just about all of them failed to meet the criteria - most of them were overly complex, the rest had no functionality..
One that looked promising was Translucid from Pantha.net. It was a big plus that it had built-in support for multiple languages. The UI looked simple. This was the one I eventually suggested to my friend and it is currently powering a test version of their new site.
While setting up the test site however, I came across several annoying issues. Should the Translucid team come across this, I hope they will make use of this friendly criticism to improve their software:
$_SERVER array. I had to do this at the top of the main PHP library to fix it: $_REQUEST ['SCRIPT_NAME'] = $_REQUEST ['REDIRECT_URL'];. Though very annoying I think it's more DreamHost's than Translucid's fault. Why can't DreamHost's PHP-CGI script clean up the environment variables itself?So there, I think those were all the issues I noticed.
(Wed, 09 Apr 2008 23:18:00 +0200). ->>
There are many obvious differences between two countries like Norway and Japan. But sometimes it takes a long time to see the interesting differences..
In Japan children are very fond of a cartoon-like figure called Ampanman. His bubbly face appears everywhere: children's toothbrushes and toothpaste, balls and toys, bikes, books and learning equipment.
At first I found it puzzling that parents did not feel negative about this advertising. Instead, they teach children his name, play with the toys and generally integrate him as part of the children's culture.
To me, this was sort of unnatural - because I come from a country which has Europe's strictest rules against advertising products to children:
Advertising children's products is completely banned from TV and radio.
In other media, advertising to children is legal but regulated by the Consumer Ombudsmann based on principles like
it must be easy to distinguish between advertising and other content. It is forbidden to exploit children's trust, lack of experience, lack of disbelief or the fact that they are easily influenced for commercial purposes.
Trying to use a children's cartoon figure to sell toothpaste would blur the lines between advertising and cartoons, and would thus likely be banned in Norway. The ombudsmann maintains detailed guidelines (pdf) including a list of cases where firms large and small have been fined or ordered to stop advertisment campaigns because they were found to be violating the guidelines.
Ideally, laws are created from a society's concerns and attitudes, and may in turn re-inforce said attitudes. Hence I'm probably more concerned about commercial influence on my children than Japanese parents, and to me this very subtle difference in attitudes is very interesting - it makes a real difference to the experience of living in either country.
(Wed, 09 Apr 2008 11:48:55 +0200). ->>
We slept at Hotell Nikko, Kansai airport, Osaka before our recent flight to Oslo.
Airport hotels are very convenient. Certainly more comfortable than all those nights spent in the Stanstead Airport checkin-hall using the laptop bag as my pillow...
But fashionable hotels with their stone columns and glitz are not my preferred surroundings. I fear that the environment might change me, slowly turn me into a person who does not use the world carefully. And that's an uncomfortable thought indeed.
(Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:41:37 +0200). ->>
"Why can't the English teach their children how to speak,
Norwegians learn Norwegian, the Greeks are taught their Greek"
I've always been amused by this line from Alan Jay Lerner's My Fair Lady script. Norwegian has a multitude of spoken dialects and has two written forms, in other words it's far from Higgins's linguistic ideals.
Others see the irony too - and that blog points out something I was not aware of, namely that there were two forms of Greek too! Quoting Nicholas Whyte:
It is ironic that the two languages Lerner and Lowe chose for Professor Higgins' line are the two European languages of which the statement was least accurate at the time they were writing.
Interesting. Professor Higgins's ideal was that greater social equality should occur through everyone following the same linguistic norms. In Norwegian we have a quite strong tradition for the opposite: respecting dialects, based on Ivar Aasen's dialect research back in the 1800nds and his constructed written language, "landsmål / nynorsk". Compared to Higgins that's quite a radical idea: respecting everyone for their spoken language.
I doubt Lerner worried much about finding languages that would live up to Higgins's ideals for his lyrics, but yet: does the unintended irony show that Aasen's project is more realistic? That used verbal language is so varied, so personal, that Higgins's norms are a violation of personal expression?
To stretch this a bit with a reference to modern Norwegian debate, Nina Witoszek and Natasza P. Sandbu write in their article "Det fortrengte i norsk kulturhistorie":
The Norwegian intelligentsia wanted to civilize the larger public, to introduce it to the salons of Europe. The project reminds one of G.B. Shaw's Pygmalion (...) In Norway the outcome seems to have been the opposite: Eliza managed to convert the refined professor to the habits and manners of the general population.
("Samtiden" magazine, issue 2, 2005, p. 59 onwards - Issue in PDF-format, my translation)
Witoszek/Sandbu discuss the historical conflict between the concepts "popular/norwegian" and "high culture/international" from a perspective that is closer to that of Welhaven - or Higgins. It's interesting that they themselves bring up the Pygmalion-reference, but they overlook a possible conclusion: perhaps Aasen's thoughts can help us reach a place where we consider individual expression without prejudices of class, taste and origin but simply by quality and expressiveness. In spite of his good intentions of social equality, Higgins can never take us there.
(Wed, 16 Jan 2008 08:45:48 +0100). ->>
Some technical background for this post: as a matter of fact, a computer is unable to work with text on a fundamental level - a computer only understands numbers. Hence, what the computer does is to create a table associating every letter with a number. Such a table is called a character set. For example, in the common ASCII table the letter "A" is assigned the number 65.
Lots of character sets exist for different systems or languages - and it is fairly obvious that you need a much longer list for, say, Chinese or Japanese than for English characters. But today most of the character sets are pretty much obsolete and I automatically choose one called UTF-8 for any new project I work on. This is the only widely supported character set which can show characters from ALL languages in the same page.
But: sometimes UTF-8 is the wrong choice. Very wrong. For Wergelandkalenderen I did choose UTF-8 for the backend database, both for storing quotes and subscribers. And I've been severely punished by problems..
Because we're not yet at a stage where all software supports UTF-8. If you send an E-mail in Norwegian with UTF-8 encoding you risk that the recipients will be unable to see the three non-English characters in the Norwegian alphabet, æ, ø and å, correctly.
After considering this (hey there, Wergeland for obvious reason never used a single Kanji or Hangul in his works so UTF-8 is NOT really required here) it became obvious that I should have used the standard Western character set. Too late though. Now the script that sends out E-mails does the conversion from UTF-8 to iso-8859-1. I hope that all errors in this script are now finally corrected, but I've sent E-mails with a mangled greeting to anyone with æ, ø or å in their names, and E-mail that tries to contain fancy curly quotes or dashes copied from Word turn the special characters into question marks since you can't convert these characters to iso-8859-1. Aargh. But it's a good experience to remember: UTF-8 is THE BEST encoding but sometimes it is the wrong choice anyway.
(Fri, 11 Jan 2008 04:58:30 +0100). ->>
At wergelandkalenderen.no you can register to have daily quotes from Henrik Wergeland's writings during 2008. The occasion is the 200th anniversary for his birth. Unfortunately your Norwegian must be very good in order to benefit from this service - according to some estimates Wergeland's vocabulary was nearly twice as large as Shakespeare's!!
(Thu, 20 Dec 2007 05:51:00 +0100). ->>
Julekorg, a Christmas decoration
