HvaHunSa wrote a post about the frognerfitter book. The debates in the comments left the actual book rather quickly and rather focused on the author, and a few seemed a bit concerned with the fact that she looks all pornographic and has a stripping pole in her living room.
To meet eventual arguments before posting: When I was little, i would have been rather embarassed if my mum was poledancing in the living room on a daily basis. I would probably have been even more embarassed if she had fake boobs. But that’s no reason to regard the pole as a lame excuse to look even more pornographic, and disregard it’s work out value. Look at the video below:
Don’t tell me that’s not good training for both muscles and flexibility. Heck - put on some clothes and it wouldn’t even be naughty-
Yesterday was rather late, and my head was overloaded with school stuff, which in a way was underlined by the first beer being drunk while listening to one of my professors talking about postmodernist history. So when I reached uglebo later on, more was going on inside my head than outside. I might have zoned out quite a bit. Fortunately I woke up and danced weirdly after a few hours, and although i was very sober it was a rather late night. This morning i felt weird and groggy, but I woke up and headed down to the national library, knowing all too well that the best way of telling my mind to stop racing, is to find out all the stuff i’m wondering about. It worked.
Now that cafe amsterdam is gone, I have yet to find a new cafe that i can call mine. While Amsterdam existed, there was no need to go anywhere else, and now that it’s gone, there are dissapointingly few places that meets my qualifications. They must have inexpensive coffee, and give refills, the music mustn’t be too loud and I must be allowed to eat sandwiches out of my own lunchbox, because if I decide to go somewhere that isn’t school to work, I’ll be sitting there for hours on end. The lunchbox-issue is the biggest challenge, and to be honest I haven’t really been looking for lunchbox friendly cafes. Today I tried cafe Kristiania. They have deep leather sofas where you can curl up and read. The coffees cost 22kr, and the refills 10. They do sell food, so I doubt they are lunchboxfriendly, but i ate a slice of bread without anyone noticing anyway. Naughty me.
Today, I’ve been reading Merry Wiesner’s book “Women and gender in early modern europe“, a book that makes generalisations about all of europe during the early modern period, stating things that puzzles me, sometimes things that are plainly wrong. Of course I can’t control her source material, because the book doesn’t have a single footnote. It’s obvious that by “gender”, she means means “women”, by the way. Not that writing a book about women is wrong, but if she had called the book “aspects of womanhood in early modern europe” or something like that, it would have been more fitting. After all, even men belong to a gender.
In the chapter about lesbianism, wiesner mentions “Maria of Antwerp (1719-81) who was arrested twice for marrying a woman. In the trials, she described herself not as a woman attracted to other women, but as a man in a woman’s body, indicationg perhaps that, like those who arrested her, she had difficulty figuring out how to describe sexual love between two women”. Everytime wiesner returns to the example of Maria, she repeats that she had to use the “man in a woman’s body”-metaphor to describe her own lesbianism. Not once does she discuss the option that Maria might have been telling the truth. I wonder why it’s so hard to imagine that a woman living as a man, who dress like a man and wants to marry another woman, and who even states in court that she’s a man in a woman’s body, might be genderqueer. I’m not saying it’s the only option, but it’s really not that far fetched.
The woodcut below is called “recipe for marital bliss” and is made by the Augsburgian artist Abraham Bach. The caption reads: “The qualities on the part of the wife which merit a beating, according to the artist are laziness, talkativeness, vanity and lust for other men, and on the part of the husband drunkenness, laziness, and not supporting his family”. According to Wiesner, it’s dated 1680, which must be about a century too late. What made me happy, is how similar the wife’s dress is to Anton Weihenmayer’s Woman at the virginal from 1586. Both woodcuts are from augsburg and the clothes are almost identical. This makes me happy. What i can’t figure out, is whether it’s socks or breeches the woman is wearing.
I thought it would be nice to start the day by scrambling an egg without breaking it.
Just to give the pessimists a symbolic finger.
Yesterday, fortid arranged a debate about wartime history. It went well. There were people watching from the corridor, and even after the break, there were plenty of people who didn’t have anywhere to sit. And the audience really took part. NRK even talked about it on Kulturnytt this morning.
To celebrate that it was a wednesday, and that the debate had gone well, we had a few beers. And then some port at Ernsts place. And it was late, but not cold when i walked homewards. When I walked past Kristines konditori, the baker had already started working.
I just finished reading Postcards. I had been looking forward to reading it for some time, cause it’s just the kind of book I’d have loved to make myself. Creating long stories based on a fragment of a sentence on an old postcard, a graffitti on a public toilet or a love letter left inside a book is something I do all the time.
According to the preface, the editor of the book, Jason Rodrigues, does the same thing. He collected interesting postcards and sent them to comic-artists who then created fictional backstories for the text or the motive on the card. It could have been really good, and some of the stories aren’t half bad. Most of them are, however, disappointing. It’s a general tendency that the stories are too short to let the narrative flow naturaly, almost every story seemed hasty and abrupt. As a reader, I didn’t get the feel of the characters before the story had ended and a new one had begun.
To be fair, I can add that the artwork ith a few exceptions was really good. I wonder if the storytellers just weren’t used to this specific kind of narratives. Perhaps a postcards nr 2 would have resulted in a better book.
An idea
After finishing the book last night, while trying to sleep, I started pondering about how wonderful it would be to make a website with old scanned postcards like this, and invite everyone around the web to write their own stories to fit. It would be nice, but I suspect that it’s impossible. Would it be legal to upload scans of a postcard that I find on a flee market? Would it be wrong to include the reciient’s name? Often, postcards like these aren’t sold by the person who wrote it, but their children, grandchildren or worse: the lack of someone to go through their things when they die. If it is legal, I guess it wouldn’t be right.
I thought it would be nice to start the day by scrambling an egg without breaking it.
