Just what I needed!

I love it when you go to a flea market, find 11 books in like 10 minutes and your friend does not go "should you really buy that many books?" but instead says "should I help you carry that?", and the guy selling them agrees to give them all to you for some eight euros. Heaven.

As we left, I saw a huge room with more boxes of books through the window. Walking away was hard, but necessary.

And I forgot to look for the things I went there for.

Anyway!

And I have no idea why Blogger turns the picture around. It has never done it before. Any ideas?

Donna Tartt - The Secret History. I have read and loved it twice, but never owned it. Now I have a tattered Norwegian copy.

Karen Armstrong - A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Looked really interesting.

Anne B. Ragde - Berlinerpoplene & Eremittkrepsene. Very famous Norwegian books that I haven't read.

Emmanuel Carrère - D'autres vies que la mienne. I've read Carrère before, before being fluent in French. I thought I should try another one now that I will understand 100%.

Morris Bishop - The Penguin Book of the Middle Ages. This just looked interesting.

Sándor Márai - Embers. I've been wanting to read something Hungarian for a long time.

Herta Müller - The Land of Green Plums and Even Back Then, the Fox Was the Hunter. Ever since she won the Nobel Prize and I heard of her I've been interested in reading some of her books.

Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go. A friend of mine read this book recently and really liked it, and I haven't read anything by Ishiguro at all.

Monique Truong - The Book of Salt. I get the impression I see this book everywhere and I took that as a sign.

Barbarians.

My Greek glass is made up of a variety of people. Some students are on the Antiquity bachelor and need either Latin or Ancient Greek, others are aspiring archaeologists, and some are just nerds. Half the group has already disappeared, and I think quite a lot of people thought they had signed up for a class in modern Greek, something that doesn't exist at Oslo University. The other day in Greek class I overheard a conversation between some girls. They were talking about loud neighbors.

GIRL 1: ..and the funny thing is that when they speak English, they speak like normal people, but as soon as they speak their made up language, they are extremely loud!
GIRL 2: Made-up language...?
GIRL 1: All languages you don't understand are like made-up languages. *duh*

The word she used for made-up language was "tullespråk", something that is a bit difficult to translate. Roughly it's "joke language", because to "tulle" is to make jokes. Examples of tullespråk are when Scandinavians add -ur to all their words and pretend they're speaking Icelandic, or add ge- to any verb and place it at the end of the sentence, pretending it's German. Or just completely made-up language, like the "Russian" in Tingeling.

At first when I heard this conversation, I got a bit annoyed, because it sounded slightly disrespectful. Then I realized how extremely appropriate it was to have such a conversation in Greek class, since the Greeks called their enemies barbarians. "Barbar-" sounded to them like incomprehensible babbling, and that was what the Persians etc. produced when speaking. In a similar vein, the Slavs called Western Europeans "mute" since they couldn't understand what they said. (Немцы has not always been used to refer to Germans, but to papal emissaries, Swedes, etc.) Oh, the joys of ethnocentrism!

Studying Ancient Greek is highly satisfactory, since all of a sudden you know where a huge amount of common Western words come from (and this idea of "pure" languages and "pure" nationalities seems even more ridiculous than it previously did), and you are able to progress very quickly since you don't have to worry that much about actually speaking the language or composing your own texts. When I study Ukrainian, I don't worry that much about learning paradigms. I usually understand the form of a word anyway; I just encounter problems when I have to produce them myself. I hope that this will eventually sort itself out with increased exposure. I have lots of paradigms to learn for ancient Greek though, so I bought an overly girlish book today to fill this purpose!

Third week texts. Awesome.

My new best friend, and my more serious notebook.

A.S. Byatt - Possession

I finished a book that could have been quite spectacular. It deals with classic literature, a mystery and a pair of academics. They're all obsessed with a great English Victorian writer and/or his wife and a less known female poet. How can that go wrong? I'm not saying it went wrong, I just didn't fall in love with the book. I found it while browsing a list of long books worth the effort on Goodreads. First I wanted to read The Historian, but after reading some reviews where people went on about how historically incorrect it was, I decided not to read it. So I settled for Possession.



I like the book, it was interesting and the story is good, but it's full of boring poetry that I was completely unable to read and that went on for pages and pages and pages... The other parts I enjoyed. It's a dual story, so if you don't like the characters in the 20th century, you may at least like the ones in the 19th.

Since I've been listening to music from the movie Drive (absolutely beautiful movie, but not suitable for people who can't stand blood) recently I couldn't help but team up this song with this book:

Desiree's Under Your Spell

Some people can't read with music. I guess that must be the kind of people who actively listen to lyrics. I don't, so I prefer to listen to music when I study and read literature. Sometimes I end up matching songs with books. For some reason, Aqua's Good Morning Sunshine goes along with The Valley of Horses (Auel) that I read and loved when I was 11. Tears Never Dry (Stephen Simmonds) matches up with Mother Earth Father Sky by Sue Harrison. I know there must be many more, but I've forgotten them. These songs end up being like a soundtrack.

Anyway, I actually started watching the movie Possession from 2002, but only saw 30 minutes or so. If a movie bores me I have no problem at all shutting it off. Watching movies is not an accomplishment, reading books is, so generally I finish books even if they bore me. I think I shut off something like a third of the movies I watch though. Therefore I can't really say all that much about this movie, other than that it seemed silly in a way the book wasn't.

I'm really not good at updating.

As usual, I spent most of Christmas worrying about the things I had to do for the next term. Difficult books to read and all that, whereas all I wanted to read was fiction. And I did read some books, The Thornbirds and Wild Seed, both of which I recommend. For those of you who don't already know what the first one is about, suffice it to know that it's an old-fashioned epic drama of the kind that can't go wrong. The second is a somewhat more curious book, about immortality and what it does to morality. I have read some other books as well, but nothing worth commenting on just yet. If I don't get overwhelmed with university in the next couple of days I will try to write a bit about some other books as well.

Good stuff.

My classes haven't actually started, but since I have a very good supervisor for my master's thesis, I'm actually starting to work on it now and not in the fall, when I'm supposed to start. I'm planning to go spend the fall in the Ukraine with a friend of mine, so naturally it would be a good idea to get the work started already at this early stage. This means I'm reading far heavier books than those previously mentioned, like Christopher Lyon's Definiteness and Michael Flier's Aspects of Nominal Determination in Old Church Slavic. Naturally, it's quite frightening. I haven't written anything beyond 25 pages so far during my time as a student, and now I am going to write my master's thesis on long form and short form adjectives and participles in Old Church Slavonic. I'm also annotating a new saint vitae from Codex Suprasliensis for the corpus that I get my data from, Житие и страдание святого мученика Конона Исаврийского.

That's in addition to my classes, which are Variants of Russian, Russian written culture - origins and history up until the 18th century, and a double class on ancient Greek! I hope all of this won't be too overwhelming. I have a goal of reading 35 books this year and on keeping up learning Ukrainian very slowly. Writing this out I feel the need for a second glass of wine, and perhaps a whiskey (cheap, of course, I am but a student).

Today I got myself a second desk! I'm very thrilled about it, because ever since I got my first desk (and I was very happy about having a desk at last after having lived in tiny apartments in Oslo), the entire surface has always been covered by my huge keyboard, my ergonomic mouse, my laptop and my extra monitor. So I end up studying on the sofa. And falling asleep. In our new apartment, my office is so big I can have two desks, a cupboard, a bookshelf and still fit in a guest bed when someone comes to visit (something that never happens, but it may). Fabulous, isn't it? The best part is that I can avoid the awful assigned seats at University for master students, that you have to apply for and go to four times a week if you don't want to lose them. You find them in small rooms with bad ventilation and you sit at half a meter's distance from the next person. And you can't eat, drink, play music and all that. How can people study in that kind of environment?

Much better.

Mixing it up.

Thanks to the wonder that is Goodreads, I got interested in reading the classic The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells. It was found among the recommendations for me based on previous Science Fiction and Classics that I have rated. At the same time, I have too many "ordinary" books to read so this one would have to wait... unless I read it in another language!

So I thought Ukrainian. But, if I read it in Ukrainian, it will take me a year. So why not French? A bit too easy perhaps. Russian? Yes, that would do it. Although Hungarian, which would take me five years, would be cool as well.

So I decided to mix it. A couple of pages in each language here and there, and I will print the whole thing piece by piece and mix it together in all my languages (which is why I need it as a text document). I wonder what this will do to my overall feeling of the book, how I perceive it once read, and in what language I will remember it. It will be a nice experiment.

The problem? I only have the book in Ukrainian and French. A friend has been looking for it in Hungarian for me, but haven't been able to find it. Even though the original is out of copyright, the translation may not be, etc. If anyone with awesome Hungarian searching powers is out there and can find it in the depths of the Internet, please (please) do. I figure finding it in Russian will be easy. Oh! German! I will include German! Any German e-book sites out there?

Popping by to say hello.

This is a poor excuse for a post, but I'm incredibly busy these days and never find the time to write about anything. There are some things that must be said though.

1) Ukrainian is a very sweet language, and I really enjoy writing semi-retarded texts in it.
2) Linguistics has the potential of being interesting.

Furthermore, I have discovered the site Goodreads thanks to Thom. I find it very practical and it further motivates me to try to squeeze in some reading every now and then. If you sign up, feel free to add me. I am especially hoping to discover some new french literature soon. Hopefully that means discovering that some book I already own is awesome.

I'm quite happy to announce that there is a new very impressive Swedish author out there, and her name is Åsa Linderborg. If you get the chance to read her debut novel, do it. There's actually a Russia-Soviet link in it that I had no idea about when I bought the book.

Åsa Linderborg. Foto: Scanpix

With regards to reading, I read this article today, "Zoran Živkovic and the plight of non-English authors", which was very interesting. The title says it all. Luckily, I'm quite sure I don't conform to the norm ;)

Oh Kiev...

This blog is turning very hard-core Slavic... It's quite natural since I nowadays don't have much time for anything else. I visited Kiev during the last week together with a friend. Since going to Russia is such a hassle, and since a friend from Russia wanted to meet up in Kiev, we decided to go there for a couple of days. I fell quite in love with the city, which has an absolutely fantastic monastery area and a huge book market! I was hoping to find an OCS dictionary (preferably Старославянский Словарь by Цейтлин) but... no, it's Russian apparently and even though they had tons of other books related to OCS, the place wasn't exactly drowning in dictionaries. I did find one single (full) dictionary, but it was outside of my price range. I got myself several grammar books though, both in Russian and Ukrainian, several decorative items for my study (I may end up looking like I'm highly religious!) and an old book in old church Slavonic (that one wasn't expensive!). I'll leave you to the pictures.

This and the two following are photos from inside the Lavra, the monastery area in Kiev. This area was built by Yaroslav the Wise's sons in the 11th century and includes caves where monks lie "buried". The old man's tomb, however, is found in the Saint Sophia Cathedral (where, unfortunately, you aren't allowed to take photos).

Books bought at the book market at Petrovka metro station. My pile is the one to the left.

This one I bought in a store with... random old stuff! I don't really know how old it is, if it is really very old or not, but it wasn't expensive and it's fun to have something that feels authentic.

Part of my new interior decoration ;)