Perty books!

I'm on a bit of a reading spree at the moment, and what I'm reading is perty books - among other things, I've just had a new batch of books from the Canongate Myths Series. There's a lot to be said about that line, both good and bad of course, but for the msot part, I'm overwhelmed. And the books looks so lovely.

But what's with the nice looking literature? Beautiful books, books that are like soft dark chocolates covered in red and gold wrapping. It is, I find, a joy to open a book that is printed on thick, cream coloured paper, where the margins are substantial, so as to make the lines just so long as is comfortable for the eye. Not the entire page is used up, as is often the case with grey-colour-paper pocket books, where the lines are too tight, the font too bold and the margins too narrow. No, I like well-bound books with beautiful cover-art, books that reach out for me and make me want to pick them up.

But of course, it matters little that the book looks lovely, if the content is bland or uninteresting.


I've recently read not only one, but two books that fill both the form and the content criteria, namely The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson and Girl meets boy by Ali smith. They both deal with issues like queer, norms and expectations, feminist and humanist questions as well as environmental problems and what we are doing to our world and to ourselves. Both JW and AS have a lovely, light and direct prose, they are approachable as writers, accessible as texts, and they both are very, very worth while.

And the books are very, very perty.

Intoxicate me

I’ve written this several times before, one way or other: I’m easily affected by smells and fragrances.

When I was walking home tonight, in the middle of the night after a very warm day, I was overcome by smells. They surrounded me, filled me, took charge of me… I laughed out loud, so strongly did it affect me.

It smelled of flowers and receding heat, of warm grass soon to be touched by the mild dew. Lund is a flowering city, there’s flowers everywhere. I love living here.

As always, when I’ve been walking through the fragrant night, I’m affected. It’s like… Well. I don’t see all my senses as rating equally. I enjoy my hearing. I like music. But I can live without my hearing. Really. Toucch is a lovely, fantastic hting, that I'd hate to lose, but it's not how I primarily percieve the world. Eyesight on the other hand… Much more important. How else to judge text and art? Sooo important to me in the way I perceive the world. Smell though (and taste is basically the same thing) works like a memory trigger, a Madeleine cake.

My memory this time wasn’t terribly specific. It was more a feeling. A feeling that I’ve walked in that kind of smell, in a similar kind of temperature, next to someone I like, someone who I didn’t have the license to touch just yet. Imagine that it’s about half an hour before the first touch. You want to touch the other person, but it’s totally out of the question. For now. You can walk down the street together though. Walk down the street, next to each other. Close. So close that you can feel the naturally generated electricity in the other persons body. You’re the anode, the other person’s the cathode. You’re being drawn, pulled, towards each other. The electricity dancing between you is very nearly tangible. When – by chance – the hairs on your arm brush against the other, you could swear there was a spark… You walk closely together to feel the heat emanating from the other, to try to smell the other person’s body without being too obvious about it…

I’ve been there.

As I was walking down the street, I wished I were there again, slowly being intoxicated by your pheromones.

The smell of tonight is the fragrance of tomorrow, and of today

As I was walking home last night, well after nightfall, the city smelled of summer night. That was the first of this year.

It’s the days accumulated flowers, it’s the laughter that still lingers, it’s the cobblestones eagerly awaiting tomorrow’s dew.

Second Korean Instalment - Wedding Gear

So. I promised ironic manicure, amazing dresses and Zen poetry. Time to deliver.

After the bride and I had left the Korean spa, we went shopping. We had our nails done, something which I’ve never done before. Well, I’ve done them myself, and Johanna’s done them for me, but it was actually quite pleasant to have someone else take really good care of your hands… I got beautiful golden nails with extravagant pink relief roses on them. I would like to label this “ironic manicure”. We also ended up finding me a very cute little dress. There’s no such thing as too many little dresses *repeats this only a tad manically*. I’d gotten a seriously gorgeous dress for the wedding. Silk, baby blue, baby doll. How much better can it get? Actually, it can. The Wedding Dress. The couple had decided for traditional Korean wedding outfits. Which worked very well for the bride, slightly less so for the groom, as he’s an almost two-meter-tall Scandinavian man… Eventually, he, too, got his silk dress on. I think the people at the Swedish Embassy were probably a little surprised when we showed up: the bride, and the mother of the bride, dressed in traditional hanbok, and the groom in a passable version of the male counterpart.

After the wedding ceremony, we went to the palace Gyeonbokgung, just next to the American Embassy. Here we photographed the newlyweds, and their four-year-old daughter, also in hanbok. We weren’t the only ones photographing them, however. They were also the target of large groups of tourists, who wanted pictures of them with palaces in the background.

Then, we took a taxi up Mt. Inwangsan, to have dinner at a very, very luxurious restaurant. It’s been ages since I ate something that delicious. I really enjoyed the Korean cuisine. I’ll have to learn how to cook Korean. If I’m not mistaken, at least one of the grocery stores around Möllevångstorget in Malmö is Korean, so maybe it’s actually possible to get some kimchi? Before dinner, ,we went for a walk around the restaurant, which was situated on he mountain slopes, with a good view over the city. Well, it would have been good, had it not been slightly overcast. Aka smoggy… Around the restaurant were several small temples, on the walls of which little Zen poems were attached. Very beautiful, although totally incomprehensible. The one on the picture says: I tame a little deer on the moss-covered banks of a stream.

For the third instalment: More palaces, the wedding ceremony and How to Run in a Hanbok.

Priorities

I need to get my priorities straight.

Saturday, I went shopping for a very nice and useful reference manageing program, one which I could really use, and which I really like. Except for when it makes Word crash, but I have high hopes for the latest version. At my last work place, it was provided to us for free. Not so here. So, I figured I'd just buy it. I mean, it's a program for suffering academics for chrissakes, how expensive can it be? Just over SEK3000 (~€330) it turned out. Do I really need that program just that much?

I left the store, saying I'd have to consider it for a while. And I continued my shopping spree by entering a clothes store, where I checked out a suit, which I really need... I'll have to think about it a little, but will probably buy it sooner rather than later. And after that, I went off to pick up a pair of rather pricy earrings (I would have paid double if I'd had to, though), which I've coveted for weeks. The artist is really, really amazing.

Seriously? What do I probably really need more? A really nifty program to facilitate my job on a daily basis, or another pair of earrings?

Seriously?

First Korean Instalment - Tall and ugly in low heels

It feels rather good to be back from Korea, to tell the truth. I loved being there, don’t take me wrong. And I’ll tell you all about the good stuff. But it is good to be home. You see, I’m not used to feeling all tall, fat and clumsy. Which is basically what I felt like in Korea. The Korean women are tiny, petite and generally incredibly elegant, with at least 10-cm-heels. I was wearing an old pair of black pants and very comfortable but unglamorous slippers. They are so elegant, in fact, that I had to wear a tiny pen skirt and very high heels to work today. I felt quite clumsy for several days, until Malin and I went shopping for lingerie, and I realised what they do to come across as so slim. Slimming underwear. You know the kind that is more or less just a huge rubber band that keeps everything in place and tucked in. Almost impossible to get into. Or out of. Ha! Tall, fat and clumsy isn’t that bad after all. At least I get to wear comfy underwear. And as comfortable shoes as I feel like.

Apart from that, Korea was wonderful. Especially the food. Kimchi – the pickled side dishes that you get with your meal – is the best invention. Yum.

To save money, Patrik, the other wedding witness, and I had decided to share a room. The first thing we did was what you always do when you’ve checked into a hotel; we checked what was on TV. The best channel – Patrik and I totally agreed on this, but Malin and Johan were a little sceptical – was undoubtedly the channel which showed StarCraft tournaments. We were only sorry we couldn’t understand what the very enthusiastic commentators were saying. The second best channel – and we all agreed on the excellence of this one – was the Pentagon Channel. There are a lot of American soldiers posted in South Korea, and it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to us that Pentagon has its own news show. But somehow we just didn’t expect it, I guess.

As I hinted above, the reason I was in Korea was to attend Malin’s and Johan’s wedding. Up until the trip, my duties as the maid of honour had mostly been about aesthetics: ring design advice and wedding dress design advice. And hen night planning, of course. What we did at the hen night was pretty much going to a spa, get pampered and just hang. Malin and I repeated that the day before their wedding. We went to a Korean spa. I’m absolutely convinced that going to a bath house abroad high lights that you are in a new culture, somewhere where you don’t have all the clues to how to behave. The first time I experienced this was a couple of years ago, when I was in California for a summer school. It soon became very clear that I was doing the undressing and showering in the wrong order after swimming. Going to a Korean bath house was slightly more complicated, and we’re sure we got a lot of it wrong. For starters, we started out in the children’s pool. The sign that said “kid pool” and the bear statuettes surrounding it were somehow not sufficient hints… What you do in a Korean spa is that you take a shower, and then you soak in different aroma therapy waters. The waters not only have different scents; they also have different temperatures. I’m not quite certain what the different temperatures are supposed to do to you, exactly, but it’s an interesting experience. To step out of a pool with 42-degree water with mint leaves, into a 43-degree pool with sea water feels like stepping into boiling water. That is weird. Interesting.

I’m sure there’s a special order in which you’re supposed to take the baths, but we didn’t manage to figure it out. The signs were all in Korean.

The spa doesn’t only mean soaking. There’s also the option to get an full body mud pack, an oil massage or a body scrub. The body scrub is intense. The scrubbing is carried out by very strong, small Korean women. If you use scrub gloves in the shower, or a loofah, you scrub. Sure. But it’s like in Crocodile Dundee: “That’s not a knife. This is a knife”. That’s not a scrub. This is a scrub. I’ve never been this clean. Or smooth. Imagine: first a scrub that takes off all the dead layers of skin and leaves it in grey disgusting rolls on the table beside you, followed by a splash of iced milk on your skin and then loads of body oil. Seriously, you don’t get much smoother. Unless maybe, just maybe, you’re a newborn child. We didn’t try out the mud pack this time around. Maybe nest time. The womb cleansing offered among the services, we didn’t feel the least inclined to try, though.

There will be more. Amazing dresses, Zen poetry and ironic manicures. But not today. Soon, though.

Needles and pins

Growing up, I never used to listen to contemporary music. I loved the music of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. You still have to play some of that rock’n’roll music, if you wanna dance with me.

One of my all time favourites is Needles and pins, written by Sonny Bono and Jack Nitsche, originally performed by the Searchers. It’s about a broken heart and the pain of seeing your ex-lover with someone new. When I was in my early teens, I used to listen to that song pretty much every day. It was on a cassette tape which I had recorded off the radio, some oldies goldies show. I loved that tape. For a couple of years, that tape was almost all I ever listened to. Eventually, my Walkman died and I stopped listening to it.

Lately, that song has kept popping up in my head.

While I was busy listening to that old school rock and pop, I nourished a rather serious fear of needles. I didn’t have any problems with vaccination shots in school, as far as I can recall, but I remember making a lot of fuzz about a shot for the mumps when I was eight or ten. Jeez, that hurt. I developed a serious phobia when I had to have a baby tooth pulled to make room for the real tooth, though. You see, in order to reach properly, dentists’ syringes are fairly huge. To cut a long story short, I was sent home after having had three grown-ups fail to hold me down and bend my mouth open by force. I got to come back the next day and get a sedative before giving it another shot (pun intended…). So yeah, phobia.

I spent years making up reasons not to be a blood donor. I was too short. Most likely I had allergies. Blood pressure so low that I’d trip on it and fall if I didn’t look carefully.

Of course, there’s nothing as powerful as vanity.

I my case, it was my belly button piercing. Which, as a lot of you know, has been followed by a number more. I was terrified, but it turned out to be a real thrill. I’ve become almost totally fearless when it comes to having bulky tattooed men sink sharp metal into my flesh. There’s a lot of metal in my body by now, and I fall asleep when I get tattooed. I even enjoy giving blood these days.

Problem solved, obviously. So, what made me think of Needles and pins? Well, I’ll be doing some travelling soon, the kind of travelling where exotic diseases like hepatitis are a risk. Inoculation is called for. So, what’s the problem, with this phobia so obviously gotten rid of? Well, apparently non-beauty related needles, with liquids being put into my body, not taken out, is a whole other matter. I kept putting off making an appointment. I didn’t get around to it until a couple of days ago.

How it turned out? The brutal, honest, truth? Well. It’s no worse than getting stung by a mosquito.

I think I’m over that phobia now.

Talons

My sister had her nails done the other week. Done as in built – beautifully long and strong, French manicures. I’m doing the low-budget version of it, fixing my own sorry excuses for nails up. It doesn’t look nearly as nice. Although I also got myself little glitters. Real girlie. It’s terribly impractical, but hey… One day I’ll probably have mine done, too. But not today.

There’s something fascinating about long, polished, strong nails. They’re symbols of so much. They signal, for one, that you have a social position where you don’t have to toil, you don’t have to work with your hands; if you did, you could never keep them long and beautiful. Like being pale was a signal of wealth in that you didn’t have to work in the fields, until suntan became a signal that you could afford going abroad and didn’t have to stay in your office all summer.

They’re also sexual symbols, of course, which naturally goes together with the whole not-working-business. If you signal that you don’t need to work, it means that you’re something of a luxury item. And luxury is desirable, no? Also, if you don’t have to work, what do you do? Do you lazy about in your sweats? No, of course not. You lazy about in something completely different. Think lingerie and negligees; jewellery and high heels; Chanel Nr 5 and champagne. And if you can’t really work, then you’re dependent on whoever you’re living with, right? And if you can’t really use your hands, it’s pretty easy to control you, as you can’t really take care of yourself. The same is of course true for high heels (it takes a looong time to learn to run in them, and if you’re wearing stilettos, it’s out altogether), corsets (properly bound, like Scarlett O’Hara, who had a 40-cm-waist, you don’t really breath too well; hence the fainting) and lotus feet (try running with those). It’s sexy to be just a little useless. That’s what luxury is – the stuff that we get that we don’t really have any immediate use for. And dependent. If your woman is dependent of you, you have to show that you’re a real man, who can provide. And she won’t get by without you. Isn’t that sexy? (For those of you who don’t know me: I’m being terribly sarcastic here.)

Then there’s one more thing, that doesn’t really seem to go with the idea of women as luxury items, but bear with me. Picture a woman’s hand, with long, shiny dark red nails. The hand sits on an arm, wrapped around a man’s torso, the hand pushes against the man’s back. Suddenly the woman is digging her nails into the man’s flesh, beyond control… Yes, of course nails are sexual. But why? There are more men interested in long nails than in pain, I reckon. Well… Imagine you have access to this piece of luxury. A piece of luxury which spends a lot of time maintaining it’s status as such. Imagine you have the power – to say nothing of the right – to affect it in such a way that it gives up its control over its attributes. Messy hair, smudged eye-liner, the risk of breaking one of those nails…

To me, nails mean something else.

For as long as I was living with my parents, every night we had the same good night ritual. My mum would come into my room and scratch my back. It always made me calm and relaxed. Like a baby. The best back scratcher, however, was my grandma. She didn’t cut her nails in a smooth half-moon shape like my mum did. She made two swift cuts on each nail, leaving the nails sharp and triangular. Like claws. Actually, that’s what we called them. When we kids wanted her to scratch our backs, we asked her to use her claaaws. Always with emphasis on every single sound (in Swedish: k-e-looor-ö-na – actually klorna. There are phonetic rules behind the weird pronunciation of course. Ask me – or better yet: ask a better phonetician – if you like). I still love having my back scratched. Whenever my sisters and I meet, that’s one way we show our affection for one another; we scratch each other’s backs. That’s what really makes me purr like a cat. Scratch my back – properly, not too hard, not too soft, but just so – and I’m wax in your hands.

This text has taken me forever to type. You see, one way that long nails make you useless is that it gets really hard to type. Especially when the nail polish isn’t dry yet…

Grace

I don't have an elegant bone in my body.

I laugh too loudly.
I swear too much.
I walk too fast.
I stand too straight.
I have too wild hair.
I cry too often.
I don't turn away when you meet my eye.

Sometimes I wish I were cool, sweet, calm and odourless. That I could wear a pale summer dress without staining or wrinkling it. That my hair would stay in place for more than five minutes. That I were tall and slim, fine limbed. That I could walk gracefully down the street.

But only sometimes.