The man without qualities

What’s the point of being a beautiful loser if no one can see me lose?

I’m almost feels smart for writing that sentence.

( Another one )

Then I make my diner shopping at the supermarket I feel like I’m in the classic Monty Python sketch there a older couple visit a cafeteria that serves spam to all dishes, the only different is that instead of spam the whole store is full with salmon. Sure that’s was an exaggeration, but the freezer cabinet is full of frozen salmon, the delicatessen sells smoked salmon, in the fish disk where are fresh salmon, if you want to buy pre-made sushi you will find that all peaces are salmon ... People here seems to eat a lot of salmon, if you are what you eat, we are a fish that is known to swim up for waterfalls just to experience the pleasure of having sex once and then die. Sure that was a exaggeration too, I just think there seems to be some kind of hype around salmon, and I don’t even like salmon. What about local freshwater fish as perch, walleye, pike? Or other marine fishes such as tuna or maybe turbot, that's a good fish, ok I've only eaten turbot once but it made an impression.

Lately I have been more interested in fish, and while I love red meat have decided that I should avoid it. Short story I hope it’s better for environment reasons, it often said that meat production is an ineffective way of making proteins and that the meat industry contribute a lot to the global warming. Therefore I have been looking more at fish and beans as protein source. Might be healthy too, in the good old days experts could speculate that the reason Japanese people had the highest life expectancy in the world was that their diet is low on animal fat and that most of their animal fat comes from fishes. Now of course we have those HFLC-diet people who think it’s very healthy to eat a lot of saturated, animal fat, (however I don’t think they can explain why the Japanese has such high life expectancy maybe they think the Japanese secretly eat lots of lard). That debate is funny, people like Neal Barnard says that a low fat vegan diet protects against diabetes and cancer, on the other hand, the HFLC enthusiasts claims that a diet high on animal fat protects against diabetes and cancer.

Something different, my bicycle was stolen, but I don’t care that much. I care about the money I lost, otherwise “Shit happens”.

The book I mentioned in my last entry: The devil's picnic: Travels Through the Underworld of Food and Drink by Taras Grescoe, is quite funny, light and easy reading about foods and drinks. In the book Grescoe describe some small, quite meaningless, rebellious thing, like smuggling chewing gums into Singapore and smuggling the French Epoisses de Bourgogne, a cheese made from unpasteurized milk, from Canada to the United States. See, cheese from unpasteurized milk are illegal in the U.S.. Grescoe however points out that we has been eating raw milk cheese for 4000 Years Before the FDA, a authority in a country where tons of kids are hospitalized after eating hamburgers contaminated with e-coli each year, determined it's dangerous. He has a point, it's popular to criticize fast food and it would not be much of a surprise if raw-milk cheese is heathery then the thing they serve on MacDonald's cheeseburgers (if that matters, it would not surprise me if there are more French people who eats in MacDonald’s then who eats unpasteurized cheese).

About the lawbreaking. I have actually made a similar thing, back in 2004 I ordered a bottle of absinthe (Un Emile 68) via the internet, and back them it was illegal to import alcohol that way, but I figure no one in the custom should notice or care (thanks to the EU that kind of private imports is now legal). It was a dark time of my life with a lot of stress and anxiety, and I did not got any help, it was very difficult to get a doctors appointment in the first place. There's a saying "You have to be healthy to be sick", meaning to get the right help from a big, bureaucratic hospital you have to be healthy enough to fight for the care you need. So the illegal imports could be seen as a "cry for help". Using an illegal method to order spirits while suffering from severe anxiety, if I put it that way, it really doesn't sound good, but I don’t think one should read too much into it.

The book also inspired me to write long entries about food, that's frustrating since I find it so difficult and challenging to write long entries. Yep, I'm writing an entry there I partly complain about writer’s block, that’s slightly ironic, but it has past. Maybe that's food I should write about, no need for days of research as with history, no need to learn complicated terms, like there is in philosophy, no controversy like there is in politics. Wait! Food is politics. For starting food safety is policy. Grescoe’s book certainly makes you ask questions like: why are several traditional craft manufacturing perfected through centuries, like making cheese from unpatorized milk from grass feed cows, often forbidden, then it in some countries are legal to feed dead cows to pigs? In EU-countries the last thing isn’t legal anymore, on the whole he real seems to like European food safety laws more then the American.

Another reason it’s political is that farmers are subsidized, that’s something the European Union is infamous for, but the US makes that too. I have misunderstood something, or is it that U.S. embraces capitalism, at the same time the corn farmers are heavily subsidized, to dump huge quantities of heavily subsidized corn, actually sold below the cost of production, over the world, that’s not laissez-faire capitalism. In case you think I have whined too much about the U.S., I can write down a far-fetched reasoning, that balance that. The second chapter in The devil's picnic is about Singapore. A city state he describe as a nightmare of social engineering and bans, where every nail that sticks out is hammered down . The result is that everyone who is somewhat rebellious and creative either is uncomfortable in Singapore or emigrates, preferably in Australia or the United States. And as long you’re able to attract the creative and rebellious people in the world, you will live in a fucking ass kicking country, (no matter what one thinks about the American diet). It is my theory.

Edit: I failed to point out that the most important reason food is politic is the question how we are going to feed the word, and with which methods. But this entry was supposed to be kind of "lightweight".

“… the Nordic pastime of visiting neighboring countries to stock up on cheaper booze. To avoid paying the equivalent of $40 for a fifth of vodka, Norwegians drive to Sweden, where the same amount cost $28. the Swedes take ferries to Denmark, where it cost $14; and the Danes cross the border to northern Germany, where the same bottle can cost as little as $7.”

From The devils picnic : Travels through the underworld of food and drink by Taras Grescoe. It’s nice to see a foreign really understand our culture.

Can I just have one passion in me? I am beginning to feel, sometimes I think so. Moisture-damaged books. Yesterday I was lucky or what it's called when a positive feeling is strong. So some may not be counting on the floor in my untidy home. Ion. Emo. Winnie the Pooh in Latin. Dictionary of the Serbo-Croatian language. Textbook in a language that does not exist.

That was translated from this morning stream of consciousness writing thing - henceforward called SCWT -, so it's not like I'm trying to impress you with my innovative, and not at all kitsch or doggerel, prose-poem. The last line “Textbook in a language that does not exist” could be seen as a reference to Shmuel Yosef Agnon's novella Iddo and Eynam, now I’m trying to impress you with my literature knowledge.

PhD Musil : or how to be an important person. Somewhere online I happened to read that PhDs on average have an IQ of 125. You don’t need to have a high IQ to know that you shouldn’t believe everything online, if the internet is a library it’s a library with post it notes instead of books and a majority of the post it notes are written by people who have know idea about the subject they write about. That said for me it’s easy to both assume it’s true and to assume it means that anyone with a IQ under 125 can’t be a good PhD, that IQ somehow determent your career. I grow up in a university town, grow up in a child friendly neighbourhood close the university, meaning PhD with kid lived there some of their kids were my friends. To me PhDs were just ordinary grown ups, nothing strange, now I see them as extraordinary intelligent persons who works 12 hour a day.

The part of the above that ‘s most like isn’t true, is that IQ determent your career. That’s what said in the first hundred pages of The man without qualities by Robert Musil. Ulrich, the man without qualities himself, is highly intelligent but it doesn’t help in his attempt to become an important person. In a letter his father writes that Ulrich always run into a task that's appeals to him, but stop after a few steps forget it and find something else. That’s what I have been doing all my grown up life. As an example, that’s why my house plants dies, I got interested in plants got house plants then I run away to the next project and forgot them. So I thought, cool I'm like the guy from a epoch-making novel, that's special or not there most be million who have thought the same thought. Musil himself was a man with quality, he was a philosopher, but gave it up and wrote this novel instead. He was a successful philosopher, he wasn't like for example Claude Simon who started to write after he had failed to become a painter, no Musil was successful in his first profession. What IQ do you need for such a life?

Amateurish writing. I have found that if I do that "stream of consciousness writing" thing every morning (see here), the text can be described as a solution containing a few drops of all the thoughts I thought the day before. And since my life consists of work, books and the internet, most of my thoughts are inspired by these three things. This is one of these sentences from one of these texts, containing one of theses drops (translated and carefully edited): Invigilator to get interpreters of memory, since language is always interpreted, others have said so. Interpretation when a word means a larger size for me than for you. Probably that's just stupid, but parts of me want's to translate everything I write in the morning and post it here.

Ron Paul for president. Sometimes I think that the internet has polarized the political landscape. For one thing it gives everyone the opportunity to look for media that bespeaks them, instated of everyone watching the same news we now have right wing people reading right wing blogg and other right wing online media, similar left wing people follows left wing bloggs and other online media. And we end up with population that's totally split in world view and opinions. So what I'm I? The smart guy who have seen through it all? No I can't be political apathetic. In my early teens I was a socialist/communist, then I was twenty I was a classical liberal, dreaming about a night watchman state. Such a cliché, going from one extreme to the other. Now? Well, I have been voting for parties in the centre of the political scale, that’s doesn’t say much, at least in Sweden almost all mainstream parties could be described as centre party.

"What to invest your energies and your time in and what do we do with our lives? The question is chasing me all the time. What grieves me is all the time I wasted on the wrong things. How do you know you made the right? The only thing that has eternal life is art. We can still read and play the Greek dramas and think they affect us and our lives. Music from the Middle Ages or Renaissance art as well. Each new generation stands on the older once shoulders. We become wiser and more experienced for each century, even if you can not believe it sometimes. When the world one day comes to the end it will be with its most developed, experienced and knowledgeable people.”

- Stefan Jarl (he’s on imdb).

Ok, I needed to shop something’s and took a walk. It was snowy, it was dark, the only light was artificially and came from street lamps and windows, windows in functionalist buildings from the sixties, it was so beautiful. I wanted to share it, I just didn’t know how. Take photos? Write a sonnet with alternating male and female line rhyme (whatever that mean)? Simply ask people to watch Fargo? Not only is it snow in that movie it also take place in Minnesota and everybody knows Minnesota is Swedish territory (with that I mean it was the destination of chose for the first wave of Swedish emigration to America). Or just forget about it?

Question: How do I know I have thought a lot about the H1N1 flu? Answer: The thought: “Could I make my own vaccine?” went through my head.

Disclaimer, to begin with I'm a gentile (that's the word, right?) and may not understand it all, so take this entry with a pinch of salt.

One thing I learned from reading two books by Samuel Agnon is that some Jews believe in reincarnation. That opens up for some interesting thoughts, for example could some Israeli be open to the possible they themselves could have been Palestinians in a previous life or that they even might be reborn as a Palestinian in the next? After reading those books I also got fascinated with tefillin and mezuzot, as a lover of old books I like the idea using rolls of parchment with handwritten text, as ritual objects. Yeah sometimes I think about religious/spiritual questions, but I haven’t funded any answers, don’t think I will. And why I have read the not too well know writer Samuel Agnon in the first place, simply since that since I read The man without qualities I have been interested in reading more about Central European culture, and Samuel Agnon wrote about Jewish life in that region, but mostly he wrote about Israel, and he wrote in Hebrew not Yiddish like I guess other Central European Jews did. Then I could ask myself if there's any meaning in becoming an autodidact on Central European culture? Another question is if this is a boring entry?

Since I have seen the documentary Bigger, stronger faster four time I think I should write some words about it. It’s good, it starts with switching between clips from action movies, professional wrestling, Ronald Reagan, athletes, military hardware, animations presenting the so called SDI aka “Star wars”, and a speaker voice saying that there was an explosion of ass kicking going on in USA then he grow up. It was kind of interesting. Then the director Christopher Bell tells the story of himself and his two brothers who all three took anabolic steroids, and that’s interesting. There’s a great scene there their mother said she thought it should be easy to have boys, since none of then should throw up everything they eat, but then she saw her sons take steroids instead. Other scene’s focus on his brother Mike Bell - who died soon after the movie was made - and his unsuccessful attempts to become something in that American wresting world. Again great, since so many can relate to that, to sacrifice all of one’s life, one’s soul, on one dream, but still fail.

Yet other scenes are about useless supplements, about fighter pilots taking amphetamine to fly long missions, about steroids used in anti-aging treatments, about steroids in baseball, about the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the “poster boy for steroids”, about fitness models take steroids, and so on, and so on. See the problem? As I see it the problem is that the documentary tries to include way too many subjects in one film, it simply doesn’t work, he’s trying to tell too much.

I find it interesting that I know what Ambien (Zolpidem) is. The thing is that the brand-name Ambien isn’t used in Sweden, the same pill is called Stilnoct - yet I have picked up the American name for the sleeping pill in question. Today medicines are such a big part of our culture that I learn not only Swedish but also American brand names. Perhaps it is because we rely on the illusion that all problems in life can be solved with white tablets, or it is for the pharmaceutical industry wants us to rely on the illusion.

This is almost embarrassing, but maybe I could amuse someone by writing about my failure with my potted plants. The thing is I have a childhood memory of my parents once and added coffee grounds to a pot of flowers, since coffee apparently contain nutrition. And since the two pomegranates that I have had as potted plants didn’t looked too good, I thought that it shouldn’t hurt to add a little coffee ground. Bad idea, don't do that, what happened was that the coffee ground started to mold, I had to throw away the plants.

Normally I don't take the buss to work, but this morning I did behind me two guys were talking. What I understood they were architect students, however they didn’t know anything about architecture and they were surprised that their teachers assumed the students had dreamed all their life’s about becoming architects. To me that was surprising, to me that's odd that they started on an architect education it they didn't had a strong yearning to become an architect. Architecture doesn't seem like anything you just slip into by mistake. Then I wanted to become an architect it was a real and strong dream, and it was approx from then I was fourteen to twenty, see during my early teens I was very naive and very ambitious, I even thought I should be able to do some other projects at my free time.

One teacher I had, actually teacher/children’s book writer, said she reserve fifteen minutes every morning for "stream of consciousness writing". Well I have been doing that for a week now, fifteen minutes of exercising the brain, and as you understand that was the reason I just asked for the name of that method of writing, thanks again.

What I have discovered after this week is that I have less desire to write entries here, some things I just wanted to write down, without having too much need to share with a handful of people here. Interesting! That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to share anything, there’re things I want to do that with, to take a trivial thing I feel like writing down a sentence from this mornings stream of consciousness writing: “Plum flowers are ritually honoured in a secondary secularities from the other side of religion”. I think its symbolism, no I have no idea and it goes without saying its amateurish, the only reason it’s close at hand to assume that is symbolism is that I yesterday reread a chapter about symbolism in a book about French modernist literature, a book that focus on Proust and the only book I have read about those things.

I have a question. There is a writing technique in which you never take a break, the pen should be constantly moving over the paper, you should write down everything that appears in your head, and you could end up with sentences that looks something like this: "I violated the most important of the rules, the one that says soy milk can be used to boil poached eggs." I think the early psychoanalysts used the technique as a way of accessing the subconscious. Does anyone know what the name for the technique is?

Do you know what a réchaud is? It’s supposed to be a “table cooker”, an alcohol burner that can be used for cooking, for example flambéing, at the diner table. I want one of whose, except for the fact I don’t have diner parties, except for the fact I don’t really have any people to invite, except that flambé meals at the diner table could be seen as “trying to hard”. Another thing I have been thinking about getting for a long time is a kerosene lamp. I think it should be fun and charming to have that kind of lamp. The silly speculation is, I want an alcohol burner and a kerosene lamp, should I be worried about being a latent pyromaniac?

The above was written before I went swimming, now then I’m back from swimming I want to complain about police students. Every time the police students are in the pool and practicing life-saving or whatever, they take up the entire pool, it is like they are trying to get in the way of us ordinary swimmers. They treat the pool as if where's martial law and the pool was occupied territory. And should polices care about their physical health? Couldn't they hang out on bars every day after work, where they can chain-smoke and wash down today's misery with whiskey and cheap beer? Just like on TV.

This is some lines I wrote yesterday, like my other resent entries it’s about politics and the world seen through my eyes. I don't know if anyone feel like reading it, and it feels half finished I don't know if I can write this kind of texts, but I'll post it anyway.

Peter Englund is the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, among other things that mean he’s the one who present the winner of the Nobel prize in literature to the world press. No too important to know, maybe I could start a Nobel prize blogg, that I should only have to update one time a year. Forget that, in one of Englund’s history books called Brev från nollpunkten ("Letters from Ground Zero"), he writes that one positive lesson, perhaps the only positive lesson, of the 20-century is that democracies are much more effective than dictatorships. In the 1930s Germany was world leading in nuclear physics but the Nazis failed to build an atomic bomb, they weren’t even close, the Americans however got a bomb ready in four years. Another example Stalin dreamed about building “the Palace of Soviets” that should be the tallest building in the world, that too was a total failure, on the place where it should have stand nothing, literally nothing, was build. At the same time in New York City they, without any problems, build skyscrapers like the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building.

The thing is every time the Freedom Tower, or whatever it’s called, is mentioned they say: “If it was in China, they should have built a skyscraper on ground zero a long time ago”. The dictatorship China is seen as more effective than the democracy USA. That quote gives us a world view that's the complete opposite of the world that’s painted in Englunds book. Is the world upside-down? Or maybe we shouldn’t draw undue conclusions from what they say about planned towers on ground zero.

I fond this quote: “former Nobel winner, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, said Obama has already provided outstanding leadership in the effort to prevent nuclear proliferation.“ That’s big words, but we haven't seen any results, at lest I haven’t seen any result, could anything be happening undivulged that motivate that wording? I still don't understand why Obama got the Nobel peace prize, but the quote opens up for the possible that Obama already have done important things, we just haven’t seen them. “Great Events Take Place In Silence”. And everybody hopes he will prevent  nuclear weapon proliferation, no one is that anti-Obama they hope he'll fail. Wait, who I'm i kidding, some seems to be that anti-Obama.

Another of my thoughts is, if Obama got the prize for not being George W. Bush could we just as well say that Mikhail Gorbachev got the prize for not being a typical Soviet leader? Ordinary Soviet leaders used the Soviet army every time there was a unrest in Eastern Europe, it happened in Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968 and Poland 1981 - in the invasion of Czechoslovakia Soviet used 6000 tanks, one day I might check how many tanks that was used in Iraq, and compare. But 1989 Gorbachev just let the revolts happen, he didn’t call in the tanks, if he had done that he certainly shouldn’t has gotten the prize. As another side note there’s a saying that the fall of communism took 10 years in Poland, 10 months in Hungary, 10 weeks in East Germany and 10 days in Romania. That saying might be better then my saying about Gorbachev and the prize.

So Barack Obama got the Nobel peace prize, not for bringing peace, but for being seen as a guy who could bring peace. If we use Occams razor it’s because the Norwegian Nobel committee suffers from brain-fog, the more far-fetched thing to do is to ask the question: don’t they say the antichrist will be seen as a peacemaker? (I checked with snopes.com and they still say that he’s not the antichrist.)