Alf-Eivind loves listening to stories and fairy tales - at least those that aren't considered "too scary". Just slightly older than three years old he has no problems following longwinded, complex stories like Den grønne votten (by Alf Prøysen), Thumbelina, Grantreet - and even the fairy tale above all other tales: The snow queen (all by H. C. Andersen). Even his father was impressed by the latter.
One day he was just below three and a half years old (my sound file is dated March 6 2008) I heard him tell a long, elaborate story about a drawing with many lines and squiggles. It was about Vesle Hans (a children's poem by Henrik Wergeland which he has seen as puppet theatre) and as the tale progressed many other fairy tale and fantasy characters emerged. I sort of got him to repeat the story for a recording - perhaps not told with the same flow and momentum as the initial version, but still an amazing glimpse of rich, story-telling-nourished child imagination at work. I have made a transcription and translated it into English. You can also listen to the recording (though it is naturally in Norwegian). Regrettably, some things are inevitably lost in translation - especially his erratic grammar and sometimes peculiar wording.
For an international audience, I should probably start with a brief summary of the Vesle-Hans poem: Hans is a young boy walking into the woods to find firewood for his grandmother. He worries that she will be cold and hungry when she can't light a fire. In the wood, he is scared by thoughts of bears and wolves but gathers a pile of branches. He realises that he has become lost but a squirrel helps him find his way home. When his grandmother welcomes him she notices that the dead branches have leaves and flowers despite it being mid-winter, a miracle that expresses the boy's love for her.
Now, the transcript of Alf-Eivin's Vesle-Hans tale (he's constantly referring to his drawing):
- Here it says Vesle-Hans, and there it says Vesle-Hans's wife. This is my letter.
- So, what did Vesle-Hans do?
- He found a small baby bear, and a small baby bear-lion.
- Baby-bear-lion?
-Yes!
- Wow. Was he scared?
- No. It was.. the baby bear said... the baby bear said.. the baby bear said NOTHING!
- He said nothing?
- No, the baby bear said nothing. So he heard nothing. But he was a bit more.. he had to go to the forest and find branches, and the ugly duckling.
- He found the ugly duckling too in the forest?
- Yes. And he found branches for granny. They flew down. But then he came to the fox. And then he came to the small baby bear, and then he came to the small bear lion.
- Did he meet even more animals?
- Yes. But he met a kantsasse.
- Kantsasse?
- It's called kantsasse.
- Is kantsasse an animal?
- No. I'm going to write this at right, right. Like that. Then he met a kantsasse which was for playing with. He plays with many toys. Then he walked again. Then he called to the ugly ducking, you know. So the ugly duckling became happy when he called to the ugly duckling. But the ugly duckling had to go to granny's house. Here it says granny's house and here it says granny and here it says Vesle-Hans and here it says the small bear and there it says the lion which fell down the stairs which was big. And Thumbelina was scared when the small baby bear - it said it was nice. So it was the small baby bear which fell down the small stair case which was made to slide down. Thumbelina joined him too. So Thumbelina is sliding down the stairs again and again. And there was an old kind Santa who was also sliding down.
And the entire wood was full of trees, on the snow on the branches. He met a small wife. It was an old one, it was Vesle-Hans's wife. She also lives there at Vesle-Hans's house. And she lives in her house. There it says granny's house for Vesle-Hans. And there it says to.. to auntie Matja Dise. To Olafur Gunnar. To Matja Dise. That's right. Now I have to fold it.
I guess we read quite a lot more for him than many other families do, and more advanced literature - but it sort of sounds like we're doing something right ;).
(Sat, 19 Jul 2008 01:33:48 +0200). ->>
In the feature comment Wergeland for hvermann in the Norwegian newspaper Vårt Land, Liv Riiser writes:
The nice thing about the Wergeland year celebrations until now is that it gets Wergeland out of the Suttung movement's embrace. Those idealists deserve respect for having kept him warm when nobody else cared, but they also patented him and dressed him in home-made costumes and anatomically correct shoes - which doesn't suit him well.
Well, it's always interesting when other people happen to reveal their prejudices... A Suttung emphasis on home-made clothes and anatomical shoes is news to me!
Yet, what she says is that this year even a journalist observes an interest in Wergeland that reaches beyond the Suttung movement. That's of course very positive, so I guess we'll just keep wondering where the home-made clothes came in and what costume Liv Riiser's Wergeland is wearing.
(Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:39:18 +0200). ->>
After a bit of gardening today I had a surprisingly large bunch of solid creeping bellflower roots. (Though I'm not really familiar with the popular English name "creeping bellflower" seems the most common name Google turns up for Campanula rapunculoides). I've been told that these tubers are edible, so why not try them..?
The culinary surprise of the day is that raw bellflower tubers are delicous! Washed and lightly peeled the roots are white, crisp and have a sweet, somewhat nut-like taste. It reminded me of "gobon", my favourite Japanese vegetable. Find some garden that needs some cleaning up and try them for yourself..
(Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:02:15 +0200). ->>
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). ->>
Julekorg, a Christmas decoration
