High Water

Another image-heavy post, I'm afraid! This became some kind of odd scrapbook business. & Tove Jansson is essentially one of our house-gods, so there was no chance I was ever going to keep this brief.

Written for ar's She's Kind of a Big Deal: Women Worth Knowing About!


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She's Kind of a Big Deal: Tove Jansson
[Photo: a woman sits at a cluttered desk. She's holding a cigarette and looking at the camera.]

Who she was: Tove Jansson was born in Helsinki in 1914 to parents who were both artists. Her father was a Finland-Swedish sculptor (that is to say, a part of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland) and her mother was a Swedish illustrator.

( Read more... )

What she did: Tove was both an artist and a writer, although she's mostly remembered for her Moomin books, which are by this time cultural icons. They're often reported to be about little white trolls who have harmless adventures and are very sweet. This is questionable.

( Read more... )

Ways to appreciate her:

Books

Many of Tove Jansson's books are translated to English (and plenty of other languages). All of the Moomin story books are currently in print in the US and the UK, and the three picture books she did in the Moomin world are also in print in the UK, although possibly not the US.

A tiny publishing company called Sort Of Books is releasing her other books right now in the UK, and I gather a buch of them have been re-released in the US at the same time, though I'm not sure exactly which are available there. They've put out new editions of or translated for the first time:

The Summer Book (an old woman and her granddaughter spend a summer on an island together)
A Winter Book (a collection of short stories drawn from various different collections)
Fair Play (my favourite - a depiction of two women growing old together, living and working and travelling. a love story. kind of.)
The True Deceiver (a very tense, terrifying book, which takes place in a little village which is completely snowbound for the winter. A young woman who is seen by the village as an outsider moves into the home of an elderly artist on the edge of town. Full of deception and manipulation - but who is manipulating who?)
Travelling Light (Collection of short stories)

I'm kind of hoping that they'll pick out Sculptor's Daughter for release, which is one of her close-to-autobiographical books about her childhood. It has been published in English, but has been out of print for years; I did manage to find a copy in my local library when I lived in the UK, though!


Art

To see her artwork you need to go to Finland, which isn't something I've managed yet myself! (Even though it's just across the water.) The Tampere Art Museum has a collection of her works.


Associated reading: English

There's very little available in English when it comes to academic texts about Tove Jansson's work, biography, or anything else really.

But here's the one that does exist:

Tove Jansson Rediscovered, edited by Kate McLoughlin and Malin Lindström Brock, published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, is a collection of papers about many different aspects of Tove Jansson's life and work. The papers aren't of even quality, but many of them are brilliant. The essays cover disciplines from queer studies to art history and beyond.


Associated reading: Swedish

In Swedish there are, conversely, about a million books about Tove Jansson's life and work.

My personal favourites are the books by Boel Westin:

Tove Jansson: ord, bild, liv, published in 2007 by Schildts, is an extensive biography, well-written and full of great information and pictures.

Familjen i dalen: Tove Janssons muminvärld, published in 1988 by Bonnier, is an analysis of Tove's Mumin books.


Links: English

- A virtual gallery with information, art and photographs relating to Tove Jansson

- Information put together in connection with a Moomin 65th anniversary exhibition

- A collection of Tove Jansson's illustrations



[Image: A short-haired Tove Jansson looks off to one side of the photographer. She's holding her glasses, one arm of them against her mouth.]

Branch asked: Do you think the Third Wave of feminism is making a new start, or covering a lot of ground that's already been covered? - and I do have Thoughts on this, but I am not actually that eloquent, so I've been fighting with it for a while.

And then yesterday my 20th anniversary edition of Bang arrived in our mailbox, and when I sat down to read it one of the first things I found was an article about feminist magazines over the last 150-odd years, written by Ulrika Knutson. And it basically covered a bunch of the stuff I'd been thinking about.

Continuing on the translation spree!

First today we have some pages from "With best wishes" from Sara Granér. She's another feminist comic artist, and generally political. She, like Karolina Bång, is a member of Dotterbolaget, a group of feminist comic artists started in Malmö in 2005.

Med vänlig hälsning/With best wishes from Sara Granér

( Read more... )

And then we've got a bit of Nanna Johansson. Nanna Johansson specialises in 1. turning opressive situations and ideas upside down to make a point, and 2. deliberate ugliness.

The book these are from is in fact called "Ugliness".

Fulheten/Ugliness by Nanna Johansson

( Read more... )

And then finally, a quick one from Liv Strömquist!

100% Fat by Liv Strömquist

( Read more... )

NEXT TIME: Liv Strömquist gives us the results of the "Take care of a man!" competition.

AND the other one! Back on schedule. *g*

Prompt: Archaeologists study dead people and animals, among other things. Do you need to know a lot of anatomy to put everything back into place (humerus =/= shinbone and so on)? And how does it feel to touch/watch/discover things that have been dead and hidden for ages?

There are a whole bunch of different things going on here, so I'll try to break this down a bit.


Do you need to know a lot of anatomy?

( short answer: yes. )

And how does it feel to touch/watch/discover things that have been dead and hidden for ages?


( Read more... )

Good morning. Today the cat made a blanket fort. It was the Best Fort Ever.



( more terrible photos from my phone )

Isn't he just begging for captions?

Prompt: I've often wondered how archaeologists determine the sex of a skeleton - I know there are differences in the pelvis, but what else is taken to be a clue? I'm also curious about how accurate it is, and whether anyone's done any studies on that.

I'm afraid I'm focusing more on the general methods used than specific studies - I'm not the only one tackling this prompt so hopefully you'll get a different range of information from the other answer! Basically all my books are in the wrong country & I lack journal subscriptions, so I can't pull up as many specific figures and examples as I'd like for accuracy. But here is the as lay as possible guide to the kinds of techniques that get used in determining the sex of human remains in archaeology.

As a note before we start, I'm also one of those people who dislikes overemphasising sexual difference and I do see this whole thing as a sliding scale rather than a choice between two boxes. I do not automatically connect sex with gender either. That's the perspective I work from, though it's by no means shared by all archaeologists!

So.


There are three things that are often used to determine the sex of skeletons, although they're of variable use and appropriateness. All of these have problems, although number two is the really what were you thinking option. More on this later! The methods are:

1. Looking at the bones
2. Looking at the grave goods
3. DNA testing


1. Looking at the bones

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2. Looking at the grave goods

( Read more... )

3. DNA testing

( Read more... )

Ta-da! I do hope that was at least somewhat helpful.

I don't spend a lot of time in Stockholm, but it pretty much is the place we have to go for anything not stocked in our home town, and very little is stocked here at all.

So here's... I don't know what, really. Kind of a guide for if you ever happen to find yourself lost in stockholm and need a cup of tea, mostly a look at my mental map of the city.


Tea

♣ Sibyllans, Sibyllegatan 35. Nearest metro: Östermalmstorg.

Sibyllans is a tea & coffee shop - definitely stockholm's best one. They're way too old-fashioned for a a website, having only discovered how to take card payments late last year, but as I understand it they're open from 10 am on weekdays and saturdays. I understand they're great for coffee too, but I don't actually drink enough coffee to justify any special sort, so I've only tried their teas. We go there every month or so and buy tea by the kilo, loose-leaf. Yes, we have a problem.

My favourite blends are sir william, which is a blend of ALL the kinds of tea and tastes mildly smokey but not overwhelmingly so; royal earl grey; and their green & white tea blend, from which basically all of the best aspects of both green and white tea come through. I have a packet of really delicious genmai cha from them that I'm rationing out, too, and when autumn rolls around I'll be grabbing a big pack of their autumn blend (they do seasonal tea blends! this is both great and kind of frustrating; last year I got a tiny packet of the autumn tea to try, feeling rather sceptical, because it has fruit in it and I'm not much of a fruit tea person unless it's citrus. But it was great, and by the time I got back to Stockholm they'd already rolled over to winter teas).

here is someone else's picture of their shop.


Cafés

♣ Vete-katten, Kungsgatan 55. Nearest metro: Hötorget or T-centralen.

Vete-katten is a famous stockholm café, deeply eccentric, and also excellent for people with allergies (like me!). They have a slightly incomprehensible system for fetching orders, involving placing your order at one counter and receiving parts of it immediately and then being sent around to various other hatches where twelve year old boys in impeccable uniforms will provide you with the rest. I don't know either. BUT what I do know is that they had delicious food and proper tea, and that you can hide yourself away in all sorts of little corners there.

I had the best gluten-free sandwich I've ever eaten there, and they had a really wide range of cakes and pastries available for me to pick from. The list got a bit overwhelming, since I'm pretty used to being offered one or two things that're suitable for me in any given place.

You can also buy things from their shop next door to take with you.


Eat out

♣ Lao Wai, Luntmakargatan 74. Nearest metro: Rådmansgatan

Lao Wai serves vegan chinese food, and a lot of their menu is also gluten-free. Authenticity I cannot speak for, but delicious it certainly is. Also known as the restaurant that made me like tofu. It's one of the few places where Val & I can comfortably find a whole list of dishes we can both eat. Tiny and kind of chaotic, but in a good way.

Teas also highly recommended.

If you want to just grab a really quick lunch, you can go there and take whatever the day's lunch dish is with a drink for 80kr, which is a good price for any lunch in Stockholm. I've eaten disgusting lunches that cost more, and I don't think I've eaten any that cost less!


♣ Etnografiska museet, Djurgårdsbrunnsvägen 34. You'll be needing a bus timetable for this one.

OK, so it's actually a museum, and the restaurant does tend to be full of noise and chaos and people fighting for seats. But they also offer delicious food from around the world, often vegetarian or vegan, often gluten free (in fact, on the day we went there, the only non gluten-free dish on offer was the spaghetti, aka concession to children's unwillingness to eat things they don't know about).

Actually, as a general record, I have yet to have a bad experience with stockholm museum restaurants. And allergy help in Sweden? Seriously, they will help you.

I suspect some places struggle more with the concept of vegetarianism than with the concept of allergies.

(The museum itself is one of the less fail-ful ethnographic museums I've been to generally, by the way.)


Get reading material

♣ Serieteket, Kulturhuset. Nearest metro: T-centralen.

Stockholm's comics library! For all your comic and manga needs! I don't think I need to say much more, but how cool is it that this exists? Books in English & Swedish.


♣ SF-bokhandeln, Västerlånggatan 48. Nearest metro: Gamla Stan.

The science fiction bookshop. Loads of manga! Loads! And loads of books! There's tons in English here, so this place was extra amazing for me when I first moved to Sweden and couldn't speak the language, but it's basically one of those nerd heaven places. Also hosts cosplay events and so on from time to time.


♣ Hallongrottan, Bergsundsgatan 25. Nearest metro: Hornstull.

Feminist bookshop with a lot of awesome aspects, from the amount of focus on queerness to the fact that there is a specific rather modest bookshelf for "straight white feminists" to the many really cool discussion evenings, talks and events they host on all imaginable topics. If I lived in Stockholm I'd be there all the time. Lovely and works hard on being inclusive. Also sell some clothes, random accessories, binders, second hand lesbian pulp fiction...


Museums

♣ Vasa museum, Galärvarvsvägen 14. Tram or bus from T-centralen.

This is basically Stockholm's best museum, or at least the most unique; other people have wrecked boats, but few are as big, as well-preserved, or sunk in such an idiotic way as the Vasa. Pride, as we say, of the Swedish navy. Terror of the Baltic. Extremely poorly designed.

There's some really good information about the ship and its building as well as the preservation work being done on it, but above all, it is a really big ship. One walks in there and goes, wow, that is a really big ship. And for that alone it's kind of worth it.

No, really.

It's just that big.



Assorted shopping

♣ DesignTorget, various locations.

The joy & danger of this shop is that you're never sure what kind of stuff you're going to find. They get a lot of new things in all the time and a lot of it is mad or useless but sometimes it just has the perfect thing. Or something that's mad in the right way.


♣ Shock, Drottninggatan 81A. Nearest metro: Rådmansgatan.

Fairly generic goth/metal/alternative shop, but my main source of shocking hair colours!


♣ Hötorgshallen, Hötorget. Nearest metro: Hötorget or T-centralen.

Mostly because they have this one stall there that sells every kind of dried fruit that you could possibly imagine, including ones without extra sugar added, and they all taste like fruit. The dried melon is particularly fascinating, for some reason...


♣ (Seasonally) Hötorget, as above.

The actual square outside the covered market has stalls selling fruit and veg all year around, but the highlight of these places is basically the mountains of mushrooms you can buy there in the autumn. So many chanterells in one place! Nom.


Oh, and if you want booze, you're going to have to go to Systembolaget, the national booze company. While there is one here in town which can order in things from bigger shops, there are some really big ones in Stockholm, like the one behind NK. For when you need that special kind of gin today, not next week.

I'm not going to judge you. I would never.

Social interaction - even online - sure does take a lot out of me sometimes. Argh.

But in better news, I finished reading Victoria Benedictsson's Money, and it was a really damn interesting book. I've mentioned a bit about it before, of course, but let's take this from the top: it's a novel written in Sweden in the 1880s, and was a contribution to an ongoing debate taking place at the time to do with marriage and the imbalance between men and women, double standards and all. A lot of the work concerned with the topic was by men, particularly Ibsen, and I guess Strindberg as well, so in that this is a book about issues concerning women's situation that was written by a woman it is, for its time, unusual. Interestingly, Benedictsson struggled to have her work taken seriously - it was dismissed as being about women's stuff, basically, and therefore not very important. Ibsen's A Doll's House, on the other hand, while also concerning issues with marriage and criticizing the way the whole institution worked at the time, was extremely controversial, but not, as far as I know, dismissed as unimportant!

The book is about a girl, Selma, who is married at the age of sixteen to a much older man without really knowing what marriage involves, because of ideas about keeping girls pure. She simply has no idea, particularly about sex. The book is about how she deals with her situation, really; it's about her journey through to... age 23, I think, and the conclusions she comes to about marriage. It really is an attack on marriage - a very carefully worded one, but all the same.* The attack is based on the inherent inequality - a situation in which men come to the marriage armed with far more knowledge of sex, are the ones who hold property within the marriage, and the ones who can be forgiven for sexual indiscretions too - and on the fact that for a certain class of women there were few options for supporting themselves besides marriage. Benedictsson, herself in an unhappy marriage to an older man, goes so far as to describe it as like prostitution: one sells oneself for money in order to survive. I seem to remember that there are characters who express similar views in A Doll's House, actually, though I'm only familiar with that piece from reading about it. I've neither read it nor seen it produced. Anyway! It was a real issue at the time, for the reasons mentioned above - particularly that women didn't hold property and weren't encouraged or allowed to earn their own living.

The book isn't perfect. I was worried when I began it that I wouldn't be able to get into it, because Selma seemed as though she had potential but things about her world-view were really frustrating and I wasn't sure about the direction it seemed to be headed for a while right at the start. This, of course, is kind of the point, as later sections showed. I did get really into it, actually, once I'd reached the point of her marriage; I was really interested to know what would happen to her and on the whole I wasn't disappointed by what did. She also does develop into a really interesting person. I thought she was pretty great. Striding around with a riding crop didn't hurt either, and nor did the female homoeroticism that crept into one of the later sections. Ahem. But the real point is that she's a good character, which is to say, flawed and interesting and with her own kind of strength and quite a bit of development. She also has strong views and expresses them.

I did think the message felt a bit... well, I've mentioned how carefully worded it felt, in that sort of balancing-act way of not wanting to push things too far, whether for fear of being unpublishable or fear of attracting too much criticism to deal with, and it did sometimes feel a little compromised as a result. Mostly I think it got through, though. I'm sure that a few other things struck me as not quite as great as they could have been, though I foolishly didn't make notes so don't expect elaboration. Oops. Overall, though, I liked it. Quite a bit, actually. I'd recommend it.

In short: proto-feminist literature I am really glad I read!

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* In the afterward to the translation I read there's a little information regarding letters she wrote to a friend while writing the book, talking about what she felt she could and couldn't say as a female author and how she felt she had to worry about these things in a way a man probably wouldn't - particularly, open discussion of sex was problematic for her, and the book is very much about sex, so one finds oneself reading between the lines. To be honest, all that considered, it still feels really pretty frank considering when it was written.

Today I worked in our tiny garden/patio until I couldn't stand up any more! Wow. I haven't pushed myself that hard in a while. But yes, I do tend to get carried away with physical labour, and yes, I do tend to forget that just because I'm tons healthier than I was a few years ago doesn't mean I can do whatever I want.

Sitting down and saying stuff on the internet time!


I have a music recommendation to make today, because I've just had a huge burst of enthusiasm for the musician in question. She is Frida Hyvönen, a Swedish singer-songwriter who performs entirely in English, and who has a really unconventional and yet actually very expressive approach to the language. Sometimes odd song lyrics make one feel that the writer just didn't actually understand the language properly and have no idea what they are saying. With Frida Hyvönen, well - maybe she doesn't know or care about the conventional ways of phrasing things in English sometimes. And maybe that is a good thing. Maybe it means she writes fabulously strange and poetic songs which I love to pieces as a result!

The first song by Frida Hyvönen that I ever heard was played to me at three in the morning after much of a bottle of gin had mysteriously vanished, and in my slightly inebriated state I thought it was the best thing I had ever ever ever heard. The next day I still thought it was pretty great, so I went and found some more.

Here is that song, which I have actually uploaded for your listening pleasure because I couldn't find it anywhere (though you can listen to it & the rest of her music legitimately on Spotify, if you're in an area which Spotify covers). It's called London!, and it's basically about a love-hate relationship with a city. London, she says, the way you hate me is better than love & I'm head over heels... London, the way you want to get rid of me makes me weak at the knees. Which is, well. I'd been living in London for a few years and having a weird time and something fitted in there. Then she said, sure I want to be like them, I don't care that they are men, I want to be rich and fine and dandy; in a town-house in London with art on the walls, and memberships and clubs for gentlemen, and I was so utterly sold you simply have no idea.

Frida Hyvönen sings a lot of songs about relationships that feel real to me and she sings about people who don't quite fit and she sing about trauma and she sings songs that're just fun (and funny). She has a really cool voice, I think; I certainly like it a lot, but I'm not really any good at explaining music, so I'll just have to ask you to listen and see what you think.

Another download:

Enemy Within
The enemy within says a body of work is just as strong as its weakest point, and other such truths.

(this track is also available free from Licking Fingers, Frida's Scandinavian label)


Some other songs on youtube:

Valerie
The Modern
Birds
Djuna!
I Drive My Friend

& if you stumble across anything else you should basically check it out (though most of what's on youtube is bad live recordings).


Frida's really inactive website:

fridahyvonen.com

A bitty entry this time, because I have a few scraps I want to gather up and get rid of that I can't make into full posts in their own right at this exact (everyone-is-sick-and-chaos-reigns) moment.


1.

Have you heard of Victoria Benedictsson? I hadn't! This might just be because I'm not very well-read, but then again, it might not be. I will add the disclaimer here that I haven't actually read her books yet, though as soon as I can get to the library there's a copy of her novel Money (Pengar) waiting for me to collect. I am pretty excited about this. It's a criticism of the inequality of marriage at the time and of the sexual double standard between men and women!

Victoria Benedictsson was a Swedish writer, working in the late 19th century. She had a pretty eventful and possibly quite scandalous life, and struggled really hard to be accepted as artistically legitimate (often being dismissed as writing about women's issues). She was concerned with women's place in society and female sexuality, and her writing apparently has a really strong element of social commentary. She also inspired/influenced (and also possibly horrified) Ibsen and Strindberg, who I bet you have heard of, because they're basically The Dudes of Scandinavian theatre & literature. (The library I worked at last year in the UK had a Scandinavian literature section, which was composed almost entirely of Ibsen, with two plays by Strindberg. That was all. For reference.) Right now she's getting a bit more attention for the fact that her writing is basically full of pretty feminist ideas, but for ages people talked about her largely as that woman who had an affair with a literary critic and then killed herself because it didn't work out, which is unfortunate. (Especially as she didn't kill herself for those reasons, as far as can be discerned from the sources avaliable, which include, you know, detailed diary entries.)

Probably more on this topic at a later date, when I'm better informed.


2.

I've come to a realisation lately: namely, that traditional narrative is just not really my best friend. I tried to be friends with it for a few years and I think it mostly produced stories which were fragmented anyway (but, in absolute fairness, sometimes worked quite well like that) and stories which I could not possibly finish, and while we'll certainly remain on speaking terms I think we need some space from each other. The problem with it is maybe that it implies to some degree a worldview that I have problems with, of definite beginnings and middles and ends, patterns which resolve themselves into meaning, etc., and while I can happily accept that this is exactly what a lot of stories need and that there are very good reasons for telling them in that sort of way I don't think I would actually want to write like that because I am... not really writing for those reasons, not really interested in what happens so much as the people it happens to (or around or because of or in the mind of or...) and the places it happens in. If I am interested in patterns it's maybe more why people perceive them the way they do, and the ways in which they try to make stories out of their lives.

Possibly this is some kind of terrible difficulty, but I'm not really convinced; I think it's more of a difference, and one I'm happy to play with, which means I should write a different kind of story. It's the sort of thing where just accepting it is likely to make for slightly happier writing. I'm interested in building up fragments into something of a story and I'm interested in ambiguity and making people join the dots up to a certain point, though of course one has to play carefully in this territory.

Looking at the authors I really love in a way which goes beyond "this is a good and thought-provoking read" or whatever and into the territory of starry-eyed admiration, I don't think this should be very surprising. Virginia Woolf? Experimental stylist fond of stream-of-consciousness and writing people more than writing stories. Tove Jansson? Penchant for constructing novels out of short stories in a way which works mysteriously well to create a sense of who people are; very little happens but a lot is communicated; not really a progression along a line so much as a collection of snapshots that could be rearranged and played around with. Murakami? Books full of signs which signify... well, what, exactly? A lot about creating a sense that there's a pattern and not providing any kind of key to it, and having this actually be satisfying. His endings resolve nothing and I like it.

I'm also more in love with magical realism and making the ordinary otherwise threatening or unsettling or strange than I am with just writing the ordinary or with writing the outright extraordinary. I think there is a space there for subtle wrongness and a sense of disconnection from the day-to-day, and though that genre doesn't necessarily do that and things which do that aren't necessarily of that genre I think it's an area which would be fun to play in. Any sort of lense which produces strangeness would work, because, well, that's how the world feels to me. I guess I am about the sense that things don't quite fit and that the supposedly ordinary can be the most disconcerting thing, because it often is to me.

This realisation brought to you partly by a conversation in which I got frustrated with Alice Munro's stories for being beautifully crafted and all about women's daily lives (OK, resoundingly straight women's daily lives with heavy emphasis on the men therein whether as a presence or an absence, which may just have been a part of the problem for me when it came to identifying with them) and absolutely boring to me because they feel like a part of a legendary Normal World I have never actually set foot in and wouldn't really enjoy if I got there. I simply can't connect to them, though they are probably really pretty good if you can.


3.

A couple of links.

a. I've decided I really like the community queering_holmes. I decided this largely because they seem to like Graham Robb's Strangers over there and because this could just be the place I'm looking for with Queer Victorian Stuff and an interest in Holmes as linked in to that context. Maybe I can air my theories about Irene Adler. Sometime when I'm feeling confident enough to be sociable. For now I'll sit and watch and feel a tiny bit gleeful.

b. I'm not actually any good at Japanese history - I've studied the bits that could reasonably be covered by a course about indigenous cultures worldwide from an archaeological perspective, which is to say, groups like the Ainu, and I've read a bunch of books about homosexuality among Samurai and monks, and I've absorbed various other information in a completely haphazard way so that the end result is a bit surreal - but here is a post about Samurai Champloo from someone who seems rather better at it. I love Samurai Champloo, for the record, and I love it as a fun and gloriously irreverent series and as a piece of commentary and also for its amazingly choreographed fight scenes. But in this case we're talking about it as a series taking a good kick at the Samurai drama genre as a whole even while theoretically playing within its borders.