Train to Frederikshavn

Looks like blogger is up to its lovable little photo tipping tricks. The train is NOT going around a curve really fast and Sandy seldom sits sideways in mid-air.

Anyway, this is Sandy and me on our way to the port of Frederikshavn, via another, larger city named Aalborg.

It is remarkable how much fun it is to travel on the train. I really enjoy driving a car, but doing it for hours to go across country is pretty mind-, wrist- and foot-numbing -- even with cruise control. Plus you get to see the countryside from the train in a much more intense way, no distracted by traffic and all the truly ugly roadside development we get in the USA: billboards, strip development, huge fast food signs, etc.

That much driving is also bad for the environ- ment, compared with the efficiency of moving a lot of people together on something like a train. (Just a short cheer here for Al Gore, who has just won the Nobel Peace prize for his campaign against global warming. (Too bad he wasn't that passionate and articulate in 2000 ;<) It is also very hard not too like a train decorated with motifs from the Viking Age. Besides these, Sandy noticed a motif from the Jelling stone right inside the train car door -- famous to medieval Scandinavia fans.
After several hours of pleasant train ride, we got to Frederiks- havn. Its most famous landmark is this powder tower. Building a round tower to guard an old city, store weapons and powder, seems to have been very popular, particularly in remote towns that didn't have other fortifications.

The town also has some nice old buildings, like this apotek (or apothecary -- drug store) and a nice Lutheran church. Mostly the town is about a container port, hotels, restaurants and shopping, because most people come through here because it is the port for the ferry to Oslo, Norway.

Scandinavia has an interesting tradition. People like to take ferries to get places because that way they can get really drunk and let someone else do the driving or navigating, whatever.

So the hotel we are in has a sauna, a huge pool and a hot tub, so that people who have just gotten off the ferry can sober up a bit, or so that those waiting for the next ferry can relax a bit. There is also a substantial shopping street and lots of restaurants. Some people literally take the ferry, get drunk, do a little shopping and then head straight back.

I ended up talking in both sauna and hot tub to a couple of guys who worked in the port (but seemed to be sobering up a bit along with the tourists). Lots of interesting Norse knotwork tattoos. One of them noticed I was reading a book in English (Terry Pratchett) in the hot tub and thought that was interesting. He had learned bits of all the Scandinavian languages and English on ships and liked to practice. He was telling he had tried German but found it too hard (apparently more than Finnish, which he had learned some of). Funny because I usually end up sitting in Danish class next to Germans, and we all notice how similar Danish is to German. In fact, learning Danish has brought a lot of German vocabulary back out of the depths of my memory because they are closer cognates than to English.

So off for some kind of dinner adventure and then, tomorrow, the ferry, which I am really looking forward, since I really like being out on boats of all sizes.

Days of technology past

This is a younger, hairier, skinnier me back in East Lansing, Michigan (1984) with our first computer, a state of the art KayPro 4. It had dual 5.25-inch floppy drives (no hardrive, so lots of juggling of floppy disks), a 2.5 MHz Z80 processor, all of 64 kB of RAM, a CP/M 2.2 operating system (lots of obscure commands to type in), and a 9-inch 80-column green monochrome screen. It measured 18 x 18 x 15 1/2 inches, and weighed 26 pounds. All of which is to say, extremely primitive by modern standards. It was popularly known as "Darth Vader's Lunch Box" because of the square-cornered, black metal case. At almost 30 pounds, it was luggable, rather than portable. But I was so enamored of it that I duly lugged it back and forth from home to office every day.

For those of us who had grown up with manual Smith-Corona portable typewriters (and later on, IBM Selectric electric typewriters) as the state of the art, this was really exciting. I had spent part of my first year at Michigan State with no computer at all, which seemed a blast into the past. Working for the U.S. Information Service's Office of Research, 1979-1983, I had become accustomed to using a dedicated word processor system called Word Stream, which was again quite an advance on typewriters. I had written my dissertation on it, four hundred pages on 9 or 10 very large floppy disks. Heck, even word processing that I had done in 1974 on an IBM 360 mainframe was easier than using a typewriter again.

Thinking back, word processing clicked with the way I think. I tend to dump in ideas into the memory of a computer in a creative burst, then more slowly expand and edit them into something that flows better. I never had the reporter's knack of composing an article in my head and then delivering it straight into the typewriter or dictating it to someone.

There was also a heady excitement about the early personal computers. I had been following the idea for years in various magazines, including the Whole Earth Review, which had switched its focus from moving back to the commune to moving into the future with the liberating potential of personal computers. I had friends who had lived on communes. My favorite teacher from high school, Lew Watson, had dropped out of teaching, built himself a house out of lava rock on a hill way above Boise, and was earning a minimal sort of living by writing for Mother Earth News. All that was pretty interesting, but when Stewart Brand of Whole Earth took off toward the liberating potential computers in the 1970s, I was one of many eager followers.

I had begun to realize that as a new professor, writing was the center of my career and life. I needed to write like crazy and publish or perish. This tool seemed heaven sent.

It was also fun to play on. My wife Sandy got hooked on Adventure, one of the original text games that came over to PCs from mainframes. (She had already played it on a WANG word processor at an old job in D.C., and was eager to play it again without stealing company time to do it.) (To be honest, everyone in our apartment who could even minimally read -- Sandy, me and our daughter Julia -- got hooked on Adventure. We mapped out Colossal Cave. We made jokes about mazes of twisty little passages all the same. We truly geeked out.)

When I realize that most of my adult life has been spent in close proximity to these machines, and when I think about how they have affected how I think and work, it makes me very curious about the experience of those who have remained isolated from or even unaware of them. This is one of the reasons I work on digital inclusion, making computers, Internet, etc. more accessible. I want to share tools that I like, but I also want to understand how people come to them with very different attitudes and interests. I have to put all geekery aside and become an anthropologist on planet Web 0.0, which is fascinating, but also makes me value the tools even more.

Anti-immigrant furies

Here is your semiotic quiz for the day: what is this very controversial Swiss poster saying?

Created by the Swiss People's Party, it shows white Swiss sheep kicking out a black (immigrant) sheep that they don't want.

The Washington Post headline October 10 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/08/AR2007100801464.html?wpisrc=newsletter is: Swiss Fury at Foreigners Boiling Over.

We spent a week in Switzerland last year with our son Chris, who had just completed a two year Mormon Church mission there. Many of the people he had talked with the most, some of whom we met, were immigrants from Iran, East Germany, Chile, etc. Typically pretty hard-working people who were trying to fit in and get ahead. Not people one could imagine getting angry about. It is also hard to imagine rage, real rage, in Switzerland -- a pretty comfortable, almost too satisfied sort of place.

So why do the Swiss rage, and why do they imagine this to be such a threat? For that matter, why do the Danes, an equally comfortable, secure group, with quite a bit more history of strong social concern for the welfare and equitable treatment of all Danes, have a strong anti-immigrant People's Party? And why do Americans have major political figures promoting things like building a wall between Texas and Mexico?

There are a lot of specific issues that feed in. People who pay high taxes to support strong health and school programs fear that foreigners who don't intend to work will take advantage of those programs. People fear that immigrants of other religions, cultures and languages won't try to fit into their cultures, but will change the host culture instead. Immigrants often are working class, even poor, and less educated, differing from the profile of increasingly middle class societies. All is exacerbated by the fact that the new people tend to look different racially and sometimes dress differently.

There are a couple of deep problems at work. Most industrial countries, even some developing ones, have aging populations that need to be supplemented by new immigrants since their birth rates are not producing enough people to sustain their economies. The immigrants are probably not going to look like the people who are already there. They will probably have different religions and customs.

The other is a deep political problem. Who gets to be a true citizen of a country? When you have Peoples' Parties that have a linguistic root in the Germanic idea of the volk (the real people of a country's national tradition), there is a strong, if implicit statement that only people of a certain ethnicity are real people who can be good citizens. (That is demographic suicide for much of Western Europe, Japan and several other places who function this way, if they keep going with it.)

The other classic model is that anyone who accepts the rules and language of a new country can be a citizen, even if they keep their religion, language, etc. from back home, too. Some people who study this call it the Roman Empire approach. Lots of people from lots of places, ethnicities and religions could become citizens as long as they were loyal to Rome, learned Latin and acquired enough of a layer of Roman culture to get along. The USA intends to have this model, but has been pretty inconsistent in the way it has treated different groups, mostly when they are visibly different in race.

I see a shipwreck coming for a number of cultures and nations of which I am very fond, including my own in the USA, if we are not careful in our own rising anti-immigrant rhetoric. Right now the USA is one of the few advanced industrial economies without a demographic crisis, which is to say that enough people are coming into the U.S. population to pay the retirement bill and keep the economy going after my generation retires and starts collecting pensions and receiving health benefits for typical elderly medical problems. In the USA, that is due largely to the fact of massive immigration of people from Mexico and Central America. Most of those people fit the Roman model of citizenship pretty well: they work hard, make sure that their kids learn English. They pay at least as many taxes as they collect benefits (if you look beyond the rhetoric to actual research done by economists on the issue), and acquire a pretty strong loyalty to the USA. (A disproportionate number, compared to other parts of the population, even fight for the USA in Iraq.) So where exactly is the crisis, one wonders?

To take a contrasting example, look at German history since the later 1800s. A little over a year ago, on my way to an academic meeting in Germany, I went through the Jewish Museum in Berlin. What struck me the most was not the Holocaust, but what happened 60 or 70 years before. Germans had to decide how to react to the German Jews. The Germans were in effect offered the talents and allegiance of several million of the smartest, most talented and productive people on the entire planet. And well before Hitler, they pretty much rejected them. These were people who largely looked like them, spoke their language, thought of themselves as German, and in many cases, had deliberately de-emphasized their own religion in order to fit in better. What panicked many Germans was in fact that the Jews were blending in, inter-marrying and becoming part of German society -- they feared it would literally dilute German culture and even German blood. What hit me then was the question, if Germany had a hard accepting those people, who were really so much like them: how in the world are they going to accept the people who are immigrating there now, who look much more different and are often more ambivalent about blending in?

Societies can do enormous harm to themselves with these kinds of reactions. Even before the horror of the Holocaust, Germany had already hurt itself enormously and benefited the USA enormously by pushing many Jews into immigration to the USA, to Latin America and elsewhere. Something similar happened in 1492, when Spain kicked out all of its Jews. So many went to the Ottoman Empire that the Sultan supposedly sent a message ironically congratulating Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain on strengthening him so much and weakening themselves so much by exiling so many talented people.

An American reacting angrily to Latinos or a Dane reacting emotionally to Arabs may not think they are looking at the father or mother of the next Albert Einstein. And maybe they aren't. But they probably are looking at the fathers and mothers of the people who will be paying their retirement and health benefits.

Fountain addendum

Danes seem to like fountains as public art. They also seem to particularly like fountains that are fairly realistic depictions of animals. Here is Sandy staring at a bronze cat on a pipe which is in turn staring at the water coming out of the pipe, which is certainly something a cat might do.

This one is in a little plaza in back of one of the main university buildings. We discovered it while walking around the university park. Sandy thinks it is functionally a gargoyle, draining water off the roof.

There is a great view out over the park from the other side of this plaza. Århus concentrates its green spaces. Most people live in 4-5 story apartment or condominium blocks, which are nearly all red brick. (Whoever had the red brick concession here did really well.)

But concen- trating the people that way makes room for some very nice parks, which has lured us into doing a great deal more walking that we often do in Texas. (The climate helps, too. It is often too hot in Texas to just go take a walk.)

Concentrating the people also makes bicycles and buses more useful, too. It is nice living in place where more people get around by bicycle and bus than by car. It makes a more livable city scape, and as energy prices continue to climb, which they seem likely to do, and as too many cars continue to add to pollution and global warming, as they seem to do, a patten based on bikes and buses seems much more sustainable. We are going to have to do a lot of re-engineering of American cities one of these days, probably in this direction, as energy prices and pollution take their toll.

I saw your piggy do a wee in our fountain

Our real subject for the day is how weird public art can be.

We went out today walking to art and food. On the way, we walked by this fountain. Part of the deal with fountains, at least when they are working, is that water comes out of spots chosen by the artist for some presumably interesting or aesthetic reason. In this one, water comes out of two pigs: the mouth of mother pig and the posterior of young junior here. Very realistic, well-executed sculptures of piggies. Maybe another homage to the great Danish pork industry?

Perhaps a bit belatedly, Sandy and I have gotten into a Terry Pratchett craze. He is a Brit science fiction writer who does not like to be called wacky. The first thing we both read was "The Hog Father," a send up of Santa Claus as he exists in a place called Ankh-Morpork, which makes Lagos look really well run and viable.

In it, the Hog Father delivers presents to good children in a airborne sleigh drawn by four large pigs. When they visit a department store, one child observes to the (fake) Hog Father, "I saw your piggy do a wee." Hence today's title.

Back to art and food. Sandy really wanted to go to Århus' modern art museum, ARoS (Aros was the name of the town in Viking times), to see a very large sculpture named, "Boy," who you can see here.

"Boy" is a very large, hyper realistic sculpture by Ron Mueck, who is well known for very large, slightly ominous sculptures of people. Danish parents are apparently known to tell their children that Boy got that big by eating his oatmeal, apparently with the intent to encourage rather than terrorize but we wonders, we does.

So after exposing ourselves to art, we went looking for food. Which in this case was almost the same thing. There was an exhibition of organic food products in a large exposition hall originally used as a riding school (or at least named for that) right next to the art museum.

I have been fascinated by food culture in Denmark, particularly the very ornate, almost sculptural open faced sandwichs called smørrebrød, so one of my colleagues at the university had recommended this exhibition as a good place to see and try some interesting ones. We did have some excellent smørrebrød. We also got to sample a lot of terrific cheese, sausage, bread, etc.

The exhibition certainly had a lot of interesting things, like these stuffed goats, next to a booth offering free range goat sausage. It was interesting to see how people reacted. Sandy, who quite likes goats, found it creepy. A two year old tried to feed one of them his apple.

The whole scene was fun, including a folk trio who were doing the greatest hits, both American and Scandinavian, of the folk music revival on both continents in the 1960s.

Interesting how you could see that as globalization of a sort, since these people had obviously listened to a lot of U.S. music, but complicated -- because a lot of that 1960s American folk revival music was Irish, Scots, Caribbean, African -- some performed by Americans like Pete Seeger, but quite a lot performed by people by Ewan MacColl, a Scotsman very popular in the U.S., who insisted in the 1960s that people should only sing their own traditional music.

Seems like a very complicated interdependence with lots of parallel development as well as a lot of back and forth. More on that later. I am getting really intrigued by this issue in music.

Getting married in Brazil?

When I told friends in Brazil I was going to marry a woman from California, there was frequently a look of stunned disbelief. They said things like, "With all these gorgeous Brazilian women around, you are going to marry an American?"

Just as an example, here is the woman who helped make girls from Ipanema famous, Astrud Gilberto, who sang on one of the best albums in the world, bossa nova Getz/Gilberto (Stan Getz and João Gilberto).

It was not only that many Brazilian women were indeed gorgeous, lively and fun, the idea of literally marrying into a culture I really liked was very appealing. I know many great marriages that started that way, and it certainly is a way to learn a lot more about the culture really fast.

However. But. I had just come out of a busted first marriage that fell apart over a lack of shared values and goals, and even less tangible lack of shared styles of dealing with problems, family culture types issues, what seems normal to you to do when things get rough (which they always do at some point). Plenty of initial mutual attraction and common interests, but lack of agreement on deeper commonalities (or lack of them) that aren't always obvious when the hormones get rolling.

So I was also feeling gun-shy and cautious. I sort of blamed my own past, particularly the Mormon Church, which my first wife had joined because I was a member. Partially to make me happy, but partially because she had her own deep push/pull, attraction/avoidance thing with religion. So I arrived in Rio determined to be secular for a while, try out some new things. I was also a relatively well off, decent looking, young (26) single American diplomat with an apartment in Ipanema (see last post). Hog heaven, right?

Briefly.

It did not take long to figure out that dating sort of exasperated me, not to mention the usual anxieties, hurt feelings, misunderstandings, etc. I really wanted someone to build something with long term. And I began to realize that I really was not only Mormon on a pretty deep level, but also a pretty specialized one, intellectual, left-leaning, etc. Small pool, especially in Brazil, which had a lot fewer Mormons at the time than it does now. None of the local Mormon girls in Rio or Brasilia fit that description, or that might have been an interesting option.

So I thought back to Stanford, where I had done my undergrad studies, where intellectual, left-leaning Mormons actually tend to congregate. Blazing quickly to mind was one Sandy Ballif, who I had met while I was engaged to my first wife, so we had just become really good buddies. So I arranged my one all-time great bureaucratic coup, and got the diplomatic service to send me back to the states for a month or so, so I could do some research for a project for them, propose a dissertation topic back in Boston, and spend some time at Stanford.

Which went so well that Sandy and I ended up married a little over a year later (after she had made her own doctoral research Fulbright pilgrimage to Iceland to learn Old Norse). And I even finished a dissertation a few years later on the topic proposed on that trip.

That compresses a lot of interesting history, so, gentle reader, we will will probably be back to some of it later.

Ipanema dreaming

Here's one from the memory banks.

This was the view from the front of my apartment building in Rio in 1976. I lived on the back side of Ipanema facing the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas. Nice view for a guy one year out of grad school.

I had joined the U.S. Information Service, the press and culture part of the diplomatic service. I took the foreign service test kind of out of curiosity, plus at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, there was sort of a mass migration to the test site. We were all kind of idealistic about improving relations or in my case, communication, between the U.S. and the rest of the world. I kept passing their tests and ultimately they offered me a job in Rio, which was much better than my other options for getting out in the world to do some research, since I had also made my way to All But Dissertation status in Fletcher's doctoral program. Wasn't quite sure whether I wanted to do something like government service or academia.

I was really interested in big developing countries with strong cultures and media, curious to see how they were dealing with what many people saw as U.S. cultural imperialism, a one way flow of TV and film from the USA out to the rest of the world. I was also really interested in India, China, Mexico and Peru, but Brazil seemed like a good place to start, from what I knew about it: music, carnival, interesting films, etc.

So off I went to learn Portuguese, how to be a diplomat and how to communicate across cultures. Some of that training was actually pretty useful. Years late a colleague at Michigan State, who was trying to start an argument that I did not want to have, said, "It's no fair, you've been trained as a diplomat." I particularly found some of the negotiation and cross-cultural training really interesting, as well as the history and background we got on Latin America. Best, though, was Portuguese itself. I had struggled with trying to learn German in high school and college. Not quite sure why it didn't take then, since I find it interesting now. But getting intensive training, focused on conversation as much as reading, was a lot more interesting that one hour a day in the classroom. Not to mention the imminent prospect of really being somewhere for three years.

Landing in Rio, I found a dinky apartment in Ipanema that my housing allowance would cover.
Kind of hard not to fall in love with Ipanema, the beach, the laid back feeling about the place, lots of interesting restaurants, etc.

Not to mention Brazilians themselves. I had been a bit shy in high school and college. Brazilians were so lively and engaging that they pulled me into their mode of behavior, which I was happy to throw myself into. I noticed that the people at the U.S. consulate who were happiest were those with the most Brazilian friends and the least dependence on the English-speaking community. So I tried to follow that practice, too. Both in Rio and later in Brasilia, when I got moved there. It seemed better than hanging with the people who saw themselves as displaced ex-patriates. There were plenty of those and I must admit I had a bit of hard time understanding them. How could you not want to throw yourself into a place like Brazil?

I just finished a fabulous ethnography on Afro-Brazilian religion, candomblé, in Salvador, done by Ruth Landes in the late 1930s. In the beginning, before she has made her way into the Brazilian communities she wanted to study, she spent time with the American expatriates there, who were largely miserable. It is interesting how some people, sent abroad, get trapped inside their own insular community. My personal experience: run, don't walk, for the door, get out into the local community as fast as possible.

The thing I did not do, which many of my like-minded friends, throwing themselves into Brazil did do, was end up marrying a Brazilian.

More on that and on Rio later.