Monday 30 July 2007

Evolution Take 2? Summerlach Take 3?


What the seagulls are up to in Aberdeen now. This one is probably the ame seagull that stole a noodle pie out of my hand in the centre of Aberdeen, and flew away with it. I still hold a grudge against it. As you can see, no good will come of this, now they've become truly Scottish and eat crisps for lunch...
(found by Luqman)

Academic correctness

This is a professional deformation that leads people to put too much weight on the academic truth content of what it being said. It is something most regular people don’t really care about all that much, though there may be variations. I sometimes get upset too quickly about the things that I research, when, in my opinion, people are talking out of their a***. These are things I value, things I have put in all my effort to get at a subtle understanding of how things work with all their complications and reservations and exceptions. I shouldn’t put too much weight on people not directly involved in the research, and who, for some reason think they can just patronise me for one reason or another. Recently I met one man who drove a BMW X3, had an extremely young girlfriend/wife, and who was being evasive when I asked him what he did in Sibiu, and how it was to live there (so much for my impression – the context was a breakfast table of a former Mayor of the village, a friend of my friend had suggested we pop into his courtyard before meeting the others in the morning of the dance, on the occasion of my accompanying the cultural formation of the village I live in to a festival in the mountains near Sibiu in a shepherd village). When I explained what I did in Romania, said: oh, I’ll tell you what European integration means for animal husbandry: a fall in the animal population. And he threw around numbers that were just taken out of the air. For him that was the end of it. How do you react to that usefully? What do I do with this encounter? Is it to be included in my research? Why? Why not?
People say things for all kinds of reasons and these may include the following: you say what you say because you want to or because it is your deep conviction or because you want to impress the conversation partner, or you want to say it because you want to assume a certain position in the discussion, the previous bit of the conversation forces you to say this, you want to make a point, you are being stroppy or stubborn or obnoxious or pleasant or chatty, you haven’t told anyone what you are really feeling about a certain person, you are gossipy by nature, you want to get a certain reaction or some other ‘gain’ from the conversation, you want to tease out a bit of detail that interests you and that has remained hidden in the conversation, you are bored and want to fill time with talk, you think this is what they want to hear, you want to cover up something else and think that noise about something else will do the trick, you are tired and you made a mistake, retrospectively, you seek closure in the conversation they initiated, because you think that it does not go anywhere if you pursue it on your own terms and that it will exclude most people around the table. With this guy, I politely sought closure and asked the host about the stuff she was serving.
How on earth are we supposed to do meaningful research with people and expect, as an outcome, to have even a grain of dust to stand on and say ‘what I say here is correct’. It is a dead end, because it undermines the anthropologist’s expert status which is highly valued in the world and brings up all kinds of awkward questions related to the value of our own research. Despite all efforts of so-called ‘collaborative’ methodology and what not, in the end you write the damn thing all by yourself, sign it, and are examined on correctness of argument, details and interpretation. And then, who is going to look at and read what we write about? I am working so the answer will not be: two anthropology students, one in London who was interested in the keyword ‘Romania’, the other in Stirling, she made a mistake with the catalogue; three family members, because they felt they needed to; and two bookworms in the British Library, because they liked the taste of the paper. They didn’t like the interpretation because it was not post-structuralist enough.

Tuesday 24 July 2007

programm um fernseeh

jo su ee block ass dach awer multifonctionnell. haut den owend anscheinend heim ins reich um fernseeh. meidozou hei.

Saturday 21 July 2007

dreaming


I have noticed that I appear to dream less on fieldwork, which is probably related to my level of tiredness. I more generally seem to dream less as I get older, passing, however, through phases where I sleep shakily and dream my anxiety.
In my new village, I sleep a lot at the moment. Romania is on a heat wave, and, due to some kind of flu, I am on antibiotics. When my feverish body temperature coincides with that of the environment, it is impossible to think, let alone to go out and meet people. Because my thoughts are so hazy, and my concentration patchy, I have a hard time following what they are saying, let alone participating in the conversation in a meaningful way. I had a nap in the afternoon to make it through the hottest hours of the day. On waking up I still remembered my dream, which has not happened in a long time. The visuality of this dream takes my breath away. How could I have dreamt this up if I could never paint it? I was in a car made only of windows with my family. We were on a beautiful journey through high mountainous lands in the clouds with the sun painting very stark colours, and long shadows, and, somewhat in contradiction, the landscape was made up of lush vegetation of fruit trees, flowers, bushes and age-old trees, haystacks, and little houses crowded in the valleys. You could almost taste this landscape. It was wonderful to drive the winding roads and see the shepherds. It was like the perfect idyll until someone said that my former clarinet teacher had a house down one of the roads. Picture: Isle of Skye, spring 2005

how do you call a cat?



As in: how do you attract its attention?
Pisipisipisi (Romania)
Kittykittykitty (UK)
Muuusmuuusmuuus or Muussi (Luxembourg)

I forget the Finnish version… maybe someone would like to remind me… any catcalling in other languages? Especially interested in Armenian, various Scandinavian languages, Caribbean creoles, Turkish, and Japanese.

How do you call a dog?
Catel (prounounce: Ketzel – the first e being one of those phonetic upside down e’s), often repeated as in: kzkzkzkzkz (Romania)
Doggie? (UK)
Muppi or Muppeli (Luxembourg)

This loveliness of a kitten we met in the Village Museum in Bucharest, and we became friends immediately.

chronicle in stone

Written by Ismael Kadare, it won the 2005 Booker Prize. I stumbled across it thinking I had not read enough about the Balkans. To be more precise, Albanian literature in my world is summarised by a few brief translated poems. The world in a city entirely made of stone that, in the course of the book, becomes sick, and bombarded, and rained on, seen through the eyes of a boy who (rightly) thinks that adult talk is boring, and strange (‘Italy is showing its claws’), and who at first likes fighter planes, even if they bombard other cities over the clouds. He also wants to read Jung because ‘he writes about magic’. It contains a description of an air raid that is more than amazing. It tells of women who stay indoors for years and years and of rain smiling secretly. It has sequences of sentences that we all dreamed about: ‘I looked at my hands. They were more nervous than I was. I put them in my pockets.’
The protagonist spends long days with his friends dreaming and wandering:
'His voice was deep and soothing, and as I leaned against the chaise longue, I dreamed of the magic of tobacco and tried to figure out how much I would smoke and how many books I would have to read in Turkish before my time to die would come. The thick books lay in the trunk, piled one on top of the other, an endless swarm of Arabic letters waiting to carry me off and reveal secrets and mysteries, for only Arabic letters knew the path to the mysteries, just as ants know the holes and fissures underground. '
‘Babazotti,’ I asked, ‘can you read ants?’ He chuckled softly and patted my tousled hair.
‘No, boy, you can’t read ants.’
‘But why not? When they’re all piled up together, they look just like Turkish letters.’
‘It only seems that way, but it’s really not true.
‘But I’ve seen them’, I insisted one last time.
As I drew on my cigarette, I wondered what ants were for if you couldn’t read them like books.
He then reads his first book (Macbeth), does not want to stop and then dreams about the letters:
‘You sleep, I’m going to read.’
‘No’, she said, ‘we don’t have enough kerosene.’
I couldn’t go to sleep. The book lay nearby. Silent. A thin object on the divan. It was so strange… Between two cardboard covers were noises, doors, howls, horses, people. All side by side, pressed tightly against one another. Decomposed into little black marks. Hair, eyes, legs and hands, voices nails, beards, knocks on doors, walls, blood, the sound of horseshoes, shouts. All docile, blindly obedient to the little black marks.
He swears at his puppy love and then has a crush on the woman who steals and who shows him a falling star:
To tell the truth, a star falling from the sky made about as much impression on me as a button falling off a coat, for Margaritas’s thick hair was spread across my neck and her hair, her whole body, had a subtle fragrance I had never noticed on Mamma, Grandma, or any of my aunts. Nor was it like any of the other smells I liked best, including the aroma of my favourite dishes.'
I haven’t used my ‘a book about xyz’ sentence yet and I would hate not to be up to your expectations. A book about writing, about pain, about magic and witchcraft, about permanence and transitoriness, about resilience and death.

une vache peut en cacher une autre

Friday 6 July 2007

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

A nice epitaph no more no less
Are these your thoughts in your temporary anger?
You ask what the title is? Add ‘I have come on invitation
Of a friend Would not mind a summary’
The title resembles something along the lines of romantic tale
Meets real life meets expectations of youth
The kind of thing you have heard about before
Curtain call
The plot is filled with details that have meaning
Only to the actors Dialogues of no universality
You ask what good it does? And the point?
So they think and carry on their play
Till it gets serious and obstacles arise
Battles are fought compromises made
And the end is yours to imagine You say
You are divided between experience and hope and love
The chapters are not numbered anymore
The story grows painfully dull and embarrassing
For all outsiders like you and you turn around in
Your seat saying ‘I am leaving see how my wife is keeping
Thank you for the play I cannot stay it is not mine’
The protagonists carry on for it makes sense to them
Their serious play advances and the plot finally (?) thickens
They take it in their own time what do they care about unity
They both do rage against the dying of the light
That they cherish more than anything
The ending is not written
It lies between what will happen and what might
You leave the theatre to hurry back to your beloved
Who needs you more than anything in her age, her fragility
You are the strong one now
And her who you need so, her tenderness, her beauty
The love you share and keep rekindling
The play goes on in its own way the outcome is up to you
What will you do? What is your ending?

Monday 2 July 2007

Life as a Tiger...


this instinct for truth makes me want to be a tiger... ;o)