Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Lifted from an e-mail I sent to a friend earlier today:

Confession time: much of the time I think of myself in the appropriate meter and as Mrissahainen. As in:

Then the mighty Mrissahainen
Pixel-slaying Mrissahainen
Mighty-sinewed chemist's daughter
Got up from the sucking sofa
Made herself the magic tisane
Made a pot of useful tisane
Useful tisane made from ginger
So she would not puke her guts out
Keep the lunch of Mrissahainen!

I cannot explain why this helps. But upon reflection I think I don't have to explain why this helps.

What I did not say in that e-mail, that I probably should have because my friend would also have gotten it, is that ever since I watched Desk Set lo these many years ago, I hear my bits of dog-Kalevala in Katharine Hepburn's voice from when she was doing Longfellow at top speed. Which I also find comforting.

I should specify further that the sofa sucks energy rather than being a generally sucky sofa in the colloquial sense of bad or nasty. It is a very fine sofa and I am fond of it.

And pixel-slaying Mrissahainen is one of my whatchems, you know, the thingers that they always call you while they're thinking up the thing to say in the next line. Wily Odysseus. Cognomen? That might not be quite it, because what I'm thinking of is like cognomen but for fitting in the line of poetry, and I don't know if there's a separate word for that.

Kalevala humor never goes out of date. (My friend Ben WINOLJ sent me this link. Heehee. Ben, for those of you keeping score with the home game, is the person who sent me a link to a news article about two Gila monsters eating their owner's corpse, with only the note, "Thought of you. Ben." He later claimed that he meant to make a joke about them wanting to grok him in fullness and knew that I would get the said joke rather than asking what "grok" meant, but apparently he was in a hurry, so what I got was that when he thinks of lizards feasting on human flesh, he considers me the go-to person in his address book. I have derived not inconsiderable amusement from this thought.)

We were driving down Hennepin, my dad behind the wheel and me in the passenger's seat and Lars, Henrik, and Sophie in the back. I was pointing out what various buildings were when they asked me, or else when I felt like it. We passed Franklin, and you can see the Scottish Rite temple behind Sebastian Joe's from Hennepin. "What is that?" they asked.

"That's a Masonic temple," I said. Brief conference in Swedish in the backseat; nobody knew. They asked, "What is that religion?" I said, "It's not really a religion, it's...have you seen the Stonecutters episode of The Simpsons?" I began to sing: "Who controls the British crown, who keeps the metric system down...?"

And immediately Lars and Henrik chimed in, right on cue and with enthusiasm: "We do! We do!"

My dad was greatly amused.

I said, "So that's who they were making fun of in that episode. The Masons or Freemasons, but they called it the Stonecutters." "This is a national club?" asked Lars. "International," I said, but it got me thinking: there appears to be some successful international conspiracy here, but it sure isn't the Masons. We're onto you, Matt Groening.

In other news, greykev brought me a Fodor's Scandinavia in 1952 with Finland and the Olympic Games, and the minute I opened it, I knew that any hopes I had of avoiding writing Laura's book were gone, gone, gone. (Laura, for those of you not keeping track of the cast of fictional people in this journal -- which really should be the vast majority of you, because you have better things to do with those brain cells -- used to be in Thermionic Night and Copper Mountain. I thought I was changing her name to Lucy, except that her behavior changed, and then it was suddenly clear to me that Laura, rather than not existing, was the other sister back home in England. And that she wanted a book. Quoth I, "Crap, crud, and corrosion." And now I know in somewhat more detail which book, as this lovely Fodor's is admonishing her that if she insists on traveling by air they will weigh her hatbox. I am going to have to exercise my not-writing-of-books skills to the utmost while I read this one. I'd put it off, but I'm going to want it for Copper Mountain revisions now that I have it. Bother. Ooh! But bother. But ooh! Etc.)

Okay, so I expect weird dreams when I'm sick, even when most of the fever is gone.

But I just got out my Finnish-English dictionary and discovered that what they were singing/chanting in my dream, over and over again, was, "Where is Väinämöinen? Who will be our Väinämöinen?"

With drumming.

So that was pretty creepy.

(Luckily, I'm used to picking up bits of languages without knowing I'm doing it, so my brain producing coherent Finnish sentences was not that creepy even though I don't speak Finnish. I really think the drumming was unnecessary, though. And the wailing.)

I'm sure you've all seen the video of the Helsinki Complaints Choir by now, but I just wanted to say: I love being a Finnophile. My hindbrain apparently had a very good idea what it was doing when it launched me on this very strange sequence of obsessions. It makes me happy.

Trust the hindbrain. I am reminding myself of this as I fix up the bits and pieces of the last few projects and take a deep breath before hurtling headlong into the next. The hindbrain may be a good deal of trouble along the way, but there's worse trouble when I argue.

Last night timprov and I got Chinese/Vietnamese food, and my fortune cookie said, "Avoid scattering your energies." Aheh. Yah, all right, cookie. At this point it's more a matter of, "Gather your scattered energies," so that's what I'm trying to do. Before the cookie brought it up, I might add. I don't take life instruction from pastries. Well -- not from pastries that mediocre, anyway.

I am distracted by something shiny -- a box! for me! -- and then there will be a host of practicalities to be addressed.

Oh, and on the subject of this weekend's poll: air? Really, air? I guess you learn something new every day, or if you don't my dad gets annoyed, but -- air? All right...I'm not surprised to find that I'm apparently far more radioactive than the lot of you, but the air and the style/voice things were total surprises. Which served the entertaining purpose, of course.

As I said yesterday, I'm down to the last two questions from my sleep-dep night in January. scottjames said, "I will ask another topic of posting (for you to do with as you will): who are a few of your favorite historical figures, and why?" I'm not going to be able to hit all of them, so just the ones that come to mind right now:

"Favorite" is kind of a tricky word. I am fascinated with all sorts of historical figures I don't actually like per se and certainly wouldn't invite to dinner. One of the major exceptions is Niels Bohr: I have an overwhelming affection for Niels Bohr. He occupies a similar mental space to some of my favorite great-uncles and great-great-uncles. You just want to give him a big ol' physicsy hug. Well, maybe you don't, but I do.

Risto Ryti is something of favorite of mine, and the Marshal, too. (Marshal Mannerheim, I mean.) That's a much chillier regard, though: no hugs. Actually I have a lot of respect for a lot of Finnish politicians, given what they had to face, and without Risto Ryti, Finland could have turned into another fascist country, both in terms of general ideology (taking in refugees from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia included) and in terms of losing their elections. They didn't. That's worth a lot.

Both Fabergés, father and son. Because it's tinkery and fiddly and neat. Because if you're going to work for a grand dictator, you might as well get him to fund something nifty. I'm also fascinated with Louis Comfort Tiffany just now, but that may pass.

King Christina. Yes, I do too mean "king." Drottning is a queen consort; Christina was kung, not drottning. Despite the abdication. Also Axel Oxenstierna while we're at it. Also Richelieu, a bit, in more a fascinated than a fond way.

Aud the Deep-Minded, for sure, and Thorbjorg the Volva, and Freydis Eiriksdottir:
Freydis came out of the camp as they were fleeing. She called, "Why do you flee such miserable opponents, men like you who look to me to be capable of killing them off like sheep? Had I a weapon I'm sure I would fight better than any of you." They paid no attention to what she said. Freydis wanted to go with them, but moved somewhat slowly, as she was with child. She followed them into the forest, but the natives reached her. She came across a slain man, THorbrand Snorrason, who had been struck in the head by a slab of stone. His sword lay beside him, and this she snatched up and prepared to defend herself with it as the natives approached her. Freeing one of her breasts from her shift, she smacked the sword with it. This frightened the natives, who turned and ran back to their boats and rowed away. (Eirik the Red's Saga)

I'm fond of historical figures from non-northern climes, but The Mark of the Sea Serpent and Sampo have eaten my brains, so that's what you get today.

Not surprisingly, some of you have asked Finland-related questions. One of you wanted to know why Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen were so interesting. Frankly, they're not. Väinämöinen especially is not the reason I became so enamored of the Kalevala. I think he's kind of a jerk. He's the mode of "hero" that means "main character," not "admirable person" in any way. There's sort of the Rumpelstiltskin thing going: the bad character is bad for wanting to have what the "hero" promised her. I like Ilmarinen a bit better than Väinämöinen, since he's a smith-hero, and there's some affinity there with Edward, my engineer-hero.

So there were a couple of things that caught me about the Kalevala that weren't Väinämöinen or Ilmarinen. One is that some of the passages are very funny indeed, and in a dry way that hits me just right. (I was reiterating on the phone to Daniel a few minutes ago that it's not that my chosen Minneapolis subculture is objectively better than my equivalent San Francisco subculture, it's that it's more suited to me personally. This is a bit like that.) Another is that there are all sorts of loose ends hanging around, many of them to do with women. I have the sense that Lönnrot did not see them as loose ends ("She's turned into a fish, what more do you want?"), but some of the male characters aren't even done when they've been killed by being chopped into teeny bloody pieces, so being a trout for awhile does not look to me like much of a crimp in a girl's style.

(My most-often-triggered Kalevala gripe is about people who want to treat the Kalevala as though it was hanging around whole cloth in Folk Tradition and was merely transcribed by Elias Lönnrot. Nonsense. Lönnrot drew on folk traditions like crazy, to be sure, but he pruned and ordered and edited and commented all over the place. He was, in fact, its author.)

Anyway. The loose bits of the Kalevala snag pretty easily for me. It is crafty. It is filled with magical stuff made by people. The magical stuff isn't just delivered from afar or passed out by spirits. It's forged and sung and painted and all sorts of things. And not in a grandiose work of art sense, where only the author's chosen types of humanity survive and thrive and people make a big stink about how artistic they are. There are magic fishing nets and cooking pots and metal women and who-knows-whats. And I kind of like that kind of magic stuff. It pokes good places in my brain.

(I have hit the punch-drunk stage of The Tired, again. ksumnersmith nearly made me aspirate tortilla by noting that on the drive down to the clinic, one arm could be markgritter's pokin' arm. I also feel cruddy, but I don't care as much as I did half an hour ago.)

Also, not entirely related, I really love "Finlandia." It cracks me up or chokes me up or sometimes both, depending on my mood: "But other lands have sunlight too, and clover, And skies are ev'rywhere as blue as mine." Yah, like that.

Two rejections, no acceptances. And a week of vacation ending in apparently viral crud. But I seem to be getting better.

I'm totally ready to write some more fiction now, though. Even though I have very little energy and all that. Definitely pining for the fiction.

Sarah Zettel's The Firebird's Vengeance is all right, but I'm having a fairly big problem with it. The bad guys are pseudo-Finns, and my brain will not stop cheering for them. "She just poisoned that lady!" says my reasonable brain, and the rest of the brain says, "Down with the tsarist oppressors! Harkka päälle!"

And I would say more, but "Enigma" is on, so apparently we get cable for a reason after all. I love this movie so much. Type at you all later.

Oh oh ooh ooh ooh! There came in the mail a package with that lovely spidery continental handwriting on it, and stamps, three of them lions with swords and one crane and one little white bell-flower. And inside it was a wrapped package in brown butcher paper, like a present. And it was, it was a present from Finland! Portti Science Fiction has sent me their Special English Issue. Free! They're so nice. If I get to Finland this summer or after, I might see if I could look them up and say hullo and thanks for being so nice to me.

It's lovely, too, glossy and ink-smelling, with poems and comics and stories and a good long article of "The History of Finnish Science Fiction Books." My new ambition is to have one of my stories translated and put in Portti. It can join all of my old ambitions jostling for position. I'm wiggly-puppy-joyful about this slim little volume. Yay Portti Science Fiction!