SCALES #47: chameleonic laser
Hello!
I read Wait, Blink by Gunnhild Øyehaug, an ingenious short novel written in 2008 and just translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson. Some of the trappings reminded me of Kundera: these very earnest, artistically minded European characters with interlocking relationships, and an obsessive return to a set of cultural and political reference points (which here include PJ Harvey, the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Paul de Man, Bushes Jr. & Sr., Kafka’s The Castle, Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2, and above all, Lost in Translation).
But as the tongue-in-cheek subtitle, "A Perfect Picture of Inner Life", suggests, the book reaches beyond that self-serious pose—which I welcomed, since I don’t think I'm as all-in on the approach as in my peak Unbearable Lightness days. Øyehaug leavens her depictions of Scandinavians frustrated at their inability to share their feelings with playfulness: short, absurd scenes of walruses, W. Bush, Dante & Virgil, de Man.
And then [spoiler alert, I guess?] there’s a wild trick ending: a “Final Comments” section that first appears to just be a list of references, but swerves into an epilogue for Sigrid, the literature student who is arguably the protagonist, and ends on a mic drop reveal that “the narrators” have been Beatrice and Dulcinea all along (!), which is expanded upon by the book’s only footnote (!!), which concludes with B & D waving goodbye while singing a Kate Bush song (!!!). I’ve never read an ending like it. It felt like the book was slowly dissolving, maybe while starting to read itself.
The closing Beatrice/Dulcinea gesture also hammers home the book’s central feminist concern with being a woman and an artist in a world filled with men, some of whom are sweet, some sad and lame, some heartless, but all of whom manage to get in the way, inadvertently or not, of achieving one’s artistic potential.
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Links!
From Washington Post coverage of the aftermath of a large immigration raid in Norwalk, Ohio:
“One of the things that had confused [Alex, a 12-year-old American citizen whose mother has been detained,] during the past few weeks was the shock he sometimes saw reflected back at him in strangers’ faces—the volunteers who toured the trailer park in utter disbelief, or the TV anchors who broke down in the middle of their live broadcasts from the U.S. border. They said separating a parent from a child was cruel and un-American. They said the United States was in the midst of a singular humanitarian crisis. They said these were the actions of a country they no longer recognized. But, to Alex, the act of family separation seemed quintessentially American. It was the cornerstone of his American experience."
Interview with West Virginia documentary filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon, director of Recovery Boys:
“I’m excited that there’s more attention drawn to the issues and the stories of this place, but I worry that it’s just more of the same. More of this outside view looking in. … I always get really defensive when people call places like where I’m from ‘Trump Country,’ even calling this place ‘coal country.’ It’s an ‘othering’ that really bothers me, and it’s not wholly true.”
Provocative history of the Internet which blames blogs, and their standardization of the reverse chronological timeline, for a breakage of the web. (h/t tcarmody’s “Did blogs ruin the web? Or did the web ruin blogs?”)
“The unprecedented spell of hot, dry weather across Wales has provided perfect conditions for archaeological aerial photography. As the drought has persisted across Wales, scores of long-buried archaeological sites have been revealed once again as ‘cropmarks’, or patterns of growth in ripening crops and parched grasslands.”
On BLDGBLOG: patent diagrams for artificial trees, just a half-step removed from botanical drawings.
An old Edible Geography interview with Victoria Henshaw on urban smellscapes and smellmarks. Time to go on a smell walk!
“Inspired by a chameleon’s prowess, researchers have made a tiny elastic laser that changes color as it is stretched and released.”
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DREAM BIG.
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—Adam