Reading List

New plan: instead of taking out library books, I’m just gonna list what I haven’t read here on my blog and assume they’ll magically show up on my desk in the graduate reading room. Thanks for the Hemingway, Jonas. I also haven’t read Love in the Time of Cholera, Germinal, or Appointment in Samarra. I’ll be expecting them shortly.

For the past week I’ve been running review sessions for my Amlit students. It’s been exhausting and nerve-wracking to be expected to know every single thing about American literature and history, but also exhilarating fun to be tested on my knowledge (“that’s free indirect discourse, too easy, c’mon, ask me another”). I mapped out fake questions for them and then we worked through the answers together. Sometimes they challenged each other, leading to better discussions than they ever had in the seminars. It’s amazing what fear of an exam will do for class participation.

My favorite CMA painting:
The Confused Process of Becoming (Portrait of Roman Johnson)

I also gave a presentation on Rita Dove in my masters seminar on ekphrasis in poetry. I managed to pull from four different Ohio artistic sources—that’s right, we kind of rock (we boast Paul Lawrence Dunbar, William Dean Howell, and Toni Morrison, too!). It was fun to once again give a presentation without worrying about keeping class attention—I could just rocket through the stuff without caring whether anyone was listening or not.

I have a new mailbox in town. The Dead Sea lotion booth on the second floor of the Bergen storsenter is now my drop-box; if you’d like to leave me a message, find the tall guy with spiked hair and an Israeli accent. It’s funny how I keep finding the Israelis, and how weirded out they are by my nationality. Today the series of questions went: “Israeli?” “Oh, then Norwegian?” “Then what?” American?! So how do you speak Hebrew?” Um, did you not notice my accent, dumbbutt? At least they have an extremely accurate grasp on what day school educations can be expected to produce in the way of language skills.

Tomorrow I will experience government bureaucratic idiocy at its finest: both the US and the Norwegian governments will pay me for teaching the same class. Anita’s going to a conference for teachers of Uttøya survivors, so I have the school to myself for the day, and apparently if she passes the keys off to me then I count as a substitute and not a Fulbright ETA, so I get a salary from the Norwegian government in addition to my Fulbright stipend. Viva la Norsk government.

Finally, finally getting homesick as Thanksgiving approaches. I want to be on that plane home stuffed with everyone returning to their families where we clap for the marines as they disembark first. I want hugs and a silly place setting and jokes in bad taste about celebrating American ethnic cleansing and to not watch football and the joy of yams and stuffing and apple pie and cranberry-chocolate tart. So eat a bit of turkey for me, please. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. 

Toddlers in Puddles

September. The month of long reading, and long walks. So while I struggle up a mountain, I turn to watch the space between it and the next grow heavy with color, and sure enough something moves, turns, flashes a silver wing in the air. I pass through the days ever more uncertain of what is routine and what is startlingly beautiful. The rain has run the hills together now, and when I straggle up a creek, mud and leaves twine their way up my legs so I can settle on my back amid the stones as part of it, the creek swimming over me on its way downstream. The houses tucked into the valleys of Bergen are cinnamon and deep burgundy and auburn, and soon the trees will match them and I will not be able to see them through the Fall. Every day I am surprised by flower-filled cemetaries and duckponds and windy paths. When I open the door of my apartment, I smell the lingering aroma of hot chocolate, or blueberry-and-vanilla tea, from when last I was home. It will be hard, when I return, to explain what I love about this land. The color of the paint on the houses? The rain that blends everything together into one harmonious watercolor? The abundance of old stone churches? The pine groves and deep lakes and grumbly mountains curled up around my home? I think… I think I may have fallen in love with Norway.

International Fantoft moment: A friend was complaining about some guy who lives on the floor above. Another girl told her to look for something good in him, since “everyone has something good about them, you just have to focus on it. That’s what I do, I look for the good.”
“Ah, I zee. But I can’t do zat, I’m French.” Perfect response.

One of my students wandered into my writing workshop completely demoralized. He told me that he reads John Grisham, not Melville, and is baffled by the depth of the story. I couldn’t laugh at him, but it reminded me of one of my grandmother’s friends who, when he heard I was going to Norway to teach English, told me to start out teaching Ibsen and all that gender-friendly stuff to lure the Norwegians in, and then I could get to the good stuff, like Grisham.

Norwegian children are the most adorable kids I’ve ever met. They walk around stiffly in what look like spacesuits to protect them against the weather. Have you ever seen a toddler jumping in a puddle? Or trying to pick her nose through her mittens? Or a baby in a stroller that is so muffled with rain-proof coverings that all you can see are two little hands and a round face peering out through the gap in the plastic? I’ve become obsessed with these drooly little packages of cute, and am developing serious stalker abilities as I try to take pictures without freaking the parents out. Here are some of my cutest:

In an attempt to distract you from my stereotypically female posting of pictures of unknown babies on my blog, I’m going to offer a bit of social commentary to justify. Norway has babies everywhere. You can’t swim down the street without splashing out of the way for an oncoming baby carriage. The best part of my morning is watching the string of neon-swathed five year-olds that commute on the bybanen at the same time as me. Oh, oops. I’m still waxing poetic about Norwegian infant cuteness. Well, what I meant to speculate upon, was, why? Norway is having a baby boom right in the middle of a world recession. Usually, the better acces to education for women, the smaller the birth rate. But Norway, which is listed first on the United Nations gender index, is swimming in babies. They’re in strollers, strapped to their father’s backs, still swimming around in utero. Baby bumps abound. So why?

The answer, I think, is both old and modern. A traditional focus on the importance of family, which means that the Norwegian workday is shorter than anything an American would countenance, and that children occupy a position of supreme importance, insures that people keep having kids. And the amazing Norwegian social benefits that make it very easy to have a child (government health care, wonderful maternity and paternity leave, free education) keep people popping out the babies as well. Good. Hope that justifies my delight in cute babies.

Goofing off with apples and honey

I taught my cheder students a bit about Rosh Hashanah. As a segueway into discussing the sacrifice of Isaac, I tied a scarf around one kid’s eyes and had the rest of the boys give him directions around the classroom. One by one, they stumbled into desks, hands outstretched, as the rest of the boys gamboled about shouting conflicting directions. It was very easy to go from there to, “did you trust your friends? Who do you trust? Why? Would you trust them even if they told you to hurt someone you loved?” and from there into the strange inexplicability of akeidat Yitzchak. I have five boys in my class, ranging from 13 to 18, and though there's only five of them, they manage to be diverse in personality. The youngest and oldest are the serious ones, who contribute thoughtfully to our philosophical discussions, while the three middle boys show a greater appreciation for bashing each other’s shins into desks while blindfolded. We held a Rosh Hashanah seder, and they exlained to me that in Norwegian, pomegranate is “granateple” –apple grenade. Which I thought was hilarious until I realized that “pomegranate” is probably French for apple grenade.

Here’s a little something that should atone for the pictures of babies by its coolness—documentation of Norwegian graffiti (just for you, JJ). Hopefully I haven’t posted pictures of anything vulgar or inappropriate. I find it so much more vivid than the graffiti I’ve seen elsewhere.

Dunno what it is about "WC",
but it's scrawled everywhere! 

Bergenhus

Sunday, Ruth (the other Fulbrighter at Fantoft) and I were planning to hike, but Bergen unleashed angry rain interspersed with sunny skies, so instead we decided to explore old Bergen.

A man was carving a giant fish

We walked down the Bryggen, bashing umbrellas against other passersby. On the wharf, tents were set up for the Bergen Food Festival. The smell of cider, waffles, and sausages wafted towards us on gusts of rain. Peddlers hawked jars of preserves and snips of lox on crackers. One stand selling lefse made me salivate. Enormous wheels of moldy-rinded cheese scared me off dairy for life.

As we walked towards the Bergenhus, an old fortress from the 13^th century, we bumped into children dressed as medieval Europeans. Little boys wore armor and stubbed swords into people’s backs, and little girls carefully picked up their velvet gowns, revealing suspiciously modern rubber rain boots beneath.

The Rosenkrantz Tower is named after governor Rosenkrantz, from the 1500’s. We started at the guard room, and wound our way up narrow stone staircases and through tiny passages. The dungeon was properly dungeon-like and sent me reeling out of it with claustrophobia clenching my body into panic. The governor had the nicest room, even nicer than the chapel or the king’s bedroom. Perhaps the builders figured that neither of the latter would sleep in the tower as often as Rosenkrantz. 

View from Rosenkrantz Tower

This week I taught Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” drawing links for my students with the current political situation in America. What would Thoreau have said about the US government today? The students’ responses saddened me. America has degenerated, and they know is. It’s not that I think we should all espouse Thoreau’s ideal –he seemed an unrealistic, uncompromising, ill-mannered sort of man—but America is so very far from the individualistic, non-materialistic  vision that he had. Still, I made excellent use of Thoreau’s “corporations have no conscience” quote to introduce Mitt Romney, and we spoke of the debt crisis in August with Thoreau’s ideas in mind.

The “rain warning” on the weather website has officially changed into a “flood warning.” Now I might have to row my way to school each day. I can picture everyone on the bybanen taking out their ski poles and helping prod us along.  

Went to the Bergen Art museum. It’s housed in three buildings: Modern, 19^th century Norwegian, and everything else. I dashed through the modern, imagining my grandparents’ comments (Kim really doesn’t like those arrangements of neon lines. And one can see his point). One diptych struck me as cool: a painting of a group of doctors standing together whose white coats merged into a blob, above which their faces still held personality, and a painting of a group of businessmen standing together whose black suits merged into a blob, above which their faces also remained distinct. It seems such a good way of representing both the individuality of the modern man as well as the way in which certain professions can blend you into anonymous authority.

The building with 19^th century Norwegian art was right up my alley. I fell in love with Dahl’s månescapes; he makes the moon glimmer behind the clouds as though they’re just haze on the canvas. Munch’s Evening on Karl Johan Street hit me with all the unpleasant anxiety that he’s so good at. Being able to see the original and compare it to Karl Johan when I was there two weeks ago was kind of stupendous. The “everything else” building was a mix of inspiring old Norwegian and nauseating modern.

This boat was ACTUALLY used on
Pirates of the Caribbean! And
parked at the wharf! How cool!

I realized that Thursdays I spend most of my day dashing from church to church. Exit Bergen Katedralskole, nod to the cathedral beside it, and set my sights to Johanneskirk, the big red spire obstructing my view of the Humanities Faculty building across town. I’m thinking of asking someone to hook up zip lines between the spires. It would cut my rainy-day commutes in half.

It really hit me I’m in Norway the other day. I went onto the nefesh b’nefesh site, but before I could enter it, a screen popped up saying, “NBN is not currently organizing flights from Norway at this time.” Firstly, how scary is it that the web knows where my computer is? (And yours, too—I can check what countries my blog viewers are in). Secondly, wow am I outside of the stream.

This weekend is supposed to be gloriously sunny. Expect pics of the Ulriken to Fløiyen trail. I’ll finally get a chance to hike it! 

Språk Åpner Dør: The Hegemony of English

Språk Åpner Dør: The Hegemony of English

Norwegian Poetry

On Monday I dropped in for lunch at the Fulbright office with my matpakke –literally, “food package”. I’ve heard that travel agents tend, as a profession, to be the happiest people in the world, because they spend their lives planning vacations. The Fulbright staff fulfill the generalization liberally. Not only do they help people go on the most incredible year-long vacations, they fund them and tack on lifelong prestige just for kicks. Everyone in the Fulbright office seems pretty happy, and correspondingly pleasant.

Managed to walked straight past Norli’s (the Norwegian equivalent of Barnes and Nobles) as I came back from Karl Johansgate without even a peek inside since the prices here make me choke, but was outwitted by an adorable little quaint second-hand shop further down the road, and spent an hour browsing.

Met Rebekka, the Jewish Norwegian who hooked me up with the community here, and her husband Tyson for coffee in one of two kosher cafes in Oslo—check that, in Norway. They are the most completely lovely people I’ve met yet. After, we walked down to the Vigeland Sculpture Garden in Frogner Park, where lots of statues of naked people lined the paths, some in rather more pleasant poses than others. An enormous monolith of writhing bodies looms over the whole park, an eerie phallic construction of human angst. A fountain of huge muscular men supporting an overflowing basin of water was my favorite; the sculptures, with legs braced against the weight behind a curtain of water, kindled a sense of the raw power of mankind. (The latent and well-squashed Ayn Randist in me flickered up).  

On the way back, I dropped past Ibsen’s grave. I’m falling in love with the cemeteries in Norway; I’m not yet sure I could live here, but I’d really like to be buried here!

Tuesday I met Matt, the Oslo ETA, two Fulbright staffers, and the three Rovers (Roving Scholars: profs who roam Norway dispensing their American-grown wisdom to the Norwegian masses) at the Oslo train station. On the way to Halden we picked up Amanda, the third ETA, who’s living in Ås, a small town right near Oslo. My big regret about this year is that the three of us aren't in the same city; they are both completely awesome in exceedingly different ways. We reached the Fremmedspråksenteret, the National Center for Foreign Language Teaching. Its slogan is, “Språk Åpner Dør,” language opens doors.

The office staff began by introducing us to English’s status as not a foreign, but a second language in Norway. The difficulty, they said, was in encouraging people to learn another language after English. Even as a part of me jumped up and down that so many people can access the intricate loveliness of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I was swamped with fear at realizing the project of cultural imperialism upon which I am embarking. I am not just teaching English, I am playing with reality and power. My students will recognize Hemingway, the Beatles, and 9/11 instead of Proust, African drummers, and the Mumbai attacks. Their minds will learn to phrase the world they see in English adjectives like elegant, revolting, and fan-fucking-tastic instead of whatever subtleties of understanding other languages would bestow. Language is so bound up with power, it sometimes makes me feel guilty about being an English major: while everyone laughs at me for my probable lack of earning power in the future, I’m playing with the tools they use to define their dreams. Teachers of language decide what deserves to be given meaning in the human lexicon, and how we access that meaning. They manipulate your very ability to understand your own thoughts. “Gentle Reader, the Word will leap upon you with leopard man iron claws” –William Burroughs knew. 

Cafe and Bookshop in Oslo:
has readings and literary nights

Okay, done taking myself so seriously. The director of the center didn’t go into any such subtleties as these. She explained the Norwegian school system to us, and gave us a tour of the facilities. Matt found a book titled Learning Under the Influence and I promptly decided to make it my go-to textbook. Another staffer talked about how Spanish is the most popular language to learn in Norway, German the most economically practical, and Arabic on the rise. They used slide shows that talked about “Research and Dissimination” and “Shool in Norway,” and a Rover discussed the “Fulbright ETA contingency”—meaning not some future possible event in which we ETA's take over the Fulbright Foundation, or possibly Norway as a last resort, but our group. I pondered the way in which authority and fancy slides cloak total incompetence-- well, not total incompetence, but the sort on a level with Bachmann's gaff about Elvis' death date. In fact, I discovered early on that as long as my posture is good, I can say just about anything and people will consider it authoritative. A rigid spine and carefully cocked head is the secret to success.

I returned to Fantoft and a text from my friend Juliet (French): “if you are interesting I found planetickets oslo-paris, 66euro in dec! =) X Also, goodfellows klubfantoft 10 minutes.” Regardless of whether I get to Paris in December, I went to the movie and watched a bunch of Europeans’ conceptions of America get even weirder. 

Oriented in Oslo

Yesterday I flew to Oslo. The USA-Norway Fulbright Foundation brought everyone in for an orientation. I met the four other people who will be living in Bergen. There are two other young women: Sarah is studying flute, and Ruth is researching climate change. Davin, a professor of digital culture, brought his young family of three boys plus a pregnant wife to Bergen. I also met Nat Wallace, the professor I will be working with on American lit seminars. He could not be more professorial. I think we’ll get along quite well –the absent-minded professor is a type with which I click.

There are 32 people in this year’s Fulbright program in Norway. Only 26 came to the orientation, since the rest are arriving mid-year. As we went around the room introducing ourselves, it became hilariously clear that about two-thirds come from Minnesota in one way or another. Many have Norwegian ancestry. Never before have I felt quite so short, or quite so un-blond.

Fulbrighters fooling around behind the Domkirk

The orientation on the first day was mostly about adjusting socially to Norway. The day ended with a reception at the US ambassador’s residence. Nice place. I might ditch academia and decide to become an ambassador instead. I met the guy for a moment, just enough time for me to mention Ohio and him to cheer for Michigan, at which point I promptly decked him. Just kidding. They gave all us Fulbrighters a glass of cider, directions to the free bar, and instructions to mingle with the very important people in the crowd (I met the Norwegian Director of Education) since Norwegians are shy. It wasn’t the best advice; most of us were not only jet-lagged but also hadn’t eaten for several hours, so the beer mixed poorly with the socializing. Still, nobody did anything too offensive (as far as I can remember).

The ambassador’s house. Nah, just kidding—this is where King Harald V lives

We gathered, glasses in hand, for several speeches. Paeter Ness, the director of Fulbright Norway, surprised me by pointing me out as the first ever ETA in Bergen—apparently if it goes well, they’re going to try to expand to Trondheim and Tromse too. I proudly looked down at my shaking hand and tried not to fall over from exhaustion. Then they herded us into a picture and let us sit down.

That green man in the picture is Ibsen

The second day was the really useful day, with finances and travel grants and health insurance covered. We went over how the bit about not freaking out at prices, and not converting everything to dollars. Kevin, the financials guy, explained that if we must, we should convert using purchasing power as our metric, instead of the 5 to 1 that the kroner meets the dollar at. This means that there’s roughly 10 kroner to every dollar: two hundred NOK buys the same amount of stuff as 20 bucks. Much better than thinking of a liter of milk as costing two dollars and fifty cents.

After the orientation, Kara (a woman who will be up in Svalbard doing research, and who has to take a shotgun with her every time she leaves the settlement in case of polar bears) and I went to the National Gallery to see what we could see. It was small, but select. The Norwegian pictures were especially intriguing. We amused ourselves by choosing art that the other had to pose like:

 

   

Um, yeah, we kind of live here. !!!

Then I hightailed it over to the kosher store in Oslo. After an extended discussion with the guard, during which I gradually slipped out of English until I was surprised to find myself speaking entirely in Hebrew to prove myself a true-blue Jew, I was allowed in. I bought peanut butter, matzah ball mix, and brunøst, or goat cheese. One for each of the places I have lived (you match ‘em up). A woman I met there had done research on Jewry in Bergen, and I think everyone will be surprised to know that there are 150 Jews in Bergen! Mostly Israeli, she said. I am in the process of linking up, and will let you know when I’ve established contact.

I finally got to try the goat cheese everyone else had snacked on at our presentation of Norwegian foods at the Foreign Diplomacy office. The resemblance to peanut butter is entirely coincidental: it tastes like caramel.

Finally, home sweet home. Which looks like this:

 

And the view from my window looks like this:

That's the ugly view, because the real mountains are behind me.

I live in a nice place.