Egg the Second

I thought it was a one-off event. Something of a miracle, really. I wasn't expecting a repeat performance. But today, 22 sleeps after the initial surprise, as I was going about my business, I spied this ovoid beauty from, presumably, the Chook nestling in one of the cats' cuddly sleeping thingies. It's beginning to feel a lot like Easter rather than ye olde Yule tyme.

Otherwise, I've been busy relaxing, looking for new writing markets (I found a few anthos that peaked my interest) and tidying up the work board over my desk, jotting down ideas, reading, and, of course, lovingly preparing the annual Danish Xmas food for Wednesday. It's best not to rush these things.

Those Darn Danes

 

I love this portrait. I love that it exists. I love that the artist, Thomas Kluge, hasn't been beheaded. I love that the painting itself hasn't been burnt, its ashes then dumped in the moat of a 1,000 year old Danish castle. I love that you can go see it at a public exhibition. Many points to the Danish Royal Family for its sense of humour.

You can read a more arty analysis of the mysterious and spooky, and altogether ooky portrait here:  http://www.fastcodesign.com/3022006/design-crime/this-painting-of-the-danish-royal-family-will-steal-your-soul

Viking Victory

Where would we be without the free spirits of the world pottering about doing their own thing? Archeology is the latest area to benefit from the exploring mind of a self-confessed nerd - Danish teenager Michael Stockbro Larsen and his trusty metal detector discovered a hoard of rare Viking coins with the cross motif of good old Harald Bluetooth and other spectacular items in a field in Northern Denmark.

 As I've said before, I love treasure hunt stories like this - the everyday triumph of someone being true to themselves and pursuing their vision, even if it means long lonely days roaming the freezing Scandinavian countryside, and reaping a fantastic reward.

I used to have a Thor's hammer like this one. I lost it a few years back. I miss it.

Zombies And Hot Cherry Sauce

Knowing we were in for a stinker of a hot day, I did my writing this morning (two zombie stories have sprung from my revved up mind - now I have to pick the one I think will have the best chance of making a certain antho, which is bound to cause me much angst), then slapped on some sunscreen and a hat, and hurried off to get Xmas supplies. I managed to return before the tub of super luxurious Belgian chocolate ice cream I sneaked into my shopping trolley melted (it was on sale! Also, I'm on holidays! And it's Christmas!)

Now that things are cooling down, it's time to get started on the annual Xmas tribulation of honouring my ancestors by making the ris a la mande for Tuesday's Christmas get together. Not that you'd catch any vikings eating the stuff. Good old rice porridge would have done them fine. Mind you, now that I think about it, where would they have procured the rice? During their annual Yuletide raids on China? Hmm, the history of this dessert is getting dodgier and dodgier. As is, with your average viking not knowing his je suis from his tu est, the a la part gives away it's pretentious and reasonably recent origins -  a couple of hundred years ago, when the rich folk of Copenhagen wanted to separate and elevate themselves from the poor, dirty-faced, rice porridge eating peasants, they took the traditional Danish risengrød, luxuriously added the whipped cream, chopped almonds, cherries and hot cherry sauce that only the best kind of people could afford, then gave it a fancy French name just to add to the general snootiness.

How Christmassy is that?

Ah well, as politically incorrect as its genesis may have been, the fact remains that ris a la mande is divinely delicious, and despite the bother, I look forward to the ritual of making it every year (and this year I can take my time, instead of cooking rice at 1 am after getting home from the Arvo Job), the overly dramatic brouhaha of eating it (we're usually already stuffed by the time we get to this calorific dessert) the cut-throat competition of seeking the whole almond hidden somewhere within the sweet mass, and the triumph of loudly gloating over one's prize (mandelgave) if you win (I usually don't. I was practically ancient before I won my first ever mandelgave).

Now that's Christmassy.

Wanted, Preferably Alive, Please.

So every now and then one looks at one's blog's statistics, and one oohs and aahs over people from exotic faraway lands dropping by (thank you), and then one checks traffic sources and stuff to see why those people ended up here and discover that they were probably seeking a learned dissertation from an expert on some esoteric subject but got me rambling on about some inanity instead, or they were looking for another Gitte Christensen (usually that Danish actress or the bigwig manager of a major company). This week someone - how exciting- put in the search words 'Gitte Kristensen criminal'.

Not me, was my first thought. But then I reconsidered. Maybe, I thought, a group of friends from my wild youth in Denmark were having a reunion party and my name came up in conversation, and then they began to wonder what had become of me, and maybe in their drunkenness they forgot that I was a true Christensen, not one of those pretenders starting with a 'k', and maybe they surmised that by moving to Australia, a shady land riddled with the descendants of convicts where TV production companies obsessed with tattooed criminals spend a substantial amount of their budgets on creating countless mini series about underworld figures, I would naturally fall in with a bad crowd (they're drunk, remember) and turn to a life of petty larceny.

That, or someone out there is looking for a Gitte who is a lot meaner and tougher and maybe bigger than me. Possibly she has tattoos - not that there's anything wrong with that.

Trial Run

I spent most of yesterday in Melbourne, taking my usual Arvo Job train to the city and, for the first time in two months, also returned home on my usual evening train. From my experiment, I suspect that for the next few weeks at least, train time will not so much be writing time as napping time.

In between, I did many un-Arvo Joberly things. First, fresh off the train, I caught up with a friend in Degraves St. Arriving early, I popped around the corner to Flinders Books only to discover that another mainstay Melbourne bookshop is closing down. So sad! Ah, the times I've ducked into that repository of second-hand treasures for a nice peaceful perusing. Long ago, I purchased one of my most favourite and always envy-inspiring books there - Writers' Houses  by Francesca Premoli-Droulers, with a forward by Margaret Duras, which features beautiful photos of the amazing abodes of Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau, Lawrence Durrell, Karen Blixen, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Castles and fantastic retreats abound, and browsing through it never fails to inspire sighs of longing and thoughts of how I too could be a great writer if only I had a mountaintop chateau in which to collect my thoughts. Anyway, since there was a 50% off sale, and for old time's sake, I bought two hardbacks - Brian Stableford's The Empire of Fear and Robert Silverberg's At Winter's End. Then it was back to Degraves St for tea and a chat.

After that, I trammed it to St Kilda (and gleefully eavesdropped on a bunch of young Danes), visited my doctor, walked back to the city via Chapel Street popping into many shops along the way, and finished off the day with fried noodles and a movie, namely A Royal Affair, simply because Mads Mikklesen is in it :) It's all about an infamous liaison between King Christian VII of Denmark, his wife Queen Caroline Mathilda, and the freethinking court physician Johann Friedrich Struensee. Not very historically accurate, it was nonetheless entertaining, and had some pertinent comments to make on the power of  ideas, information and misinformation control, political spin, influencing the masses, and the sheer nastiness of folk with much when it comes to sharing their toys with the less fortunate. It was also a long movie - if not for the arrival of a just-in-the-nick-of-time tram to speedily carry me across town, I would have missed my homeward train.

So I did the time (a day crammed with fun like that certainly illustrates just how many perfectly good hours our day and arvo jobs take up) and even though I had to sleep in this morning, I'm not overly pooped now. I should be right for a gentle return to the Real World next week.

Now for some walking and writing.

Ready for Easter

It's been a blah week full of blah happenings with a lot more blah of the most blahey sort to come - I'm soooooo up for four days off.

A friend at the Arvo Job brought this box set to work thus making it extremely easy for me for me to finally watch Forbrydelsen (which is actually The Crime in Danish, but the show is always called The Killing in English). Ok, so I'm five years behind the rest of the world in joining the Sofie Gråbøl as Detective Inspector Sarah Lund fan club, but better late than never.

Also, I bought Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, and almost ended up paying many $$$$ for it when the book selling girl and I disagreed on how much change I was owed (I wanted $31 back, but she thought $1 was enough), so it's back to Hunger Games land.

There are people to visit. There are out and about things to do. There are films lined up and hot cross buns ready for a movie marathon.

And always, calling me, calling me, calling me, there is the writing.

You Can Call Me Alison

Oh dear. First the voice recognition system not recognising my first name yesterday, now this piece on bad news for people with hard-to-pronounce names. As someone who is frequently called Gertrude, Gretta, or (I'm not sure why) Kim by confused Antipodeans, it seems that a name change might be a career booster. To think I could have been richer with another name...

In Denmark, of course, the entire issue is moot.

Talkin' 'Bout My Demographic

Today's chapter in the microtrends book was all about me and my tribe - Extreme Commuters, defined by the Census Bureau (US) as people who travel at least 90 minutes each way to get to work, a development mostly caused by crazy economics and large populations. Good to know I'm in the company of so many millions upon millions of people all over the modern world. Aah well, at least I'm not a Mega Commuter who has to fly to work in another country each day!

Anyway, as I read the chapter, I was ticking off the boxes in my head and nodding, and I laughed when I reached the paragraph about increased audio book sales. The author describes Extreme Commuters as 'the transportation equivalent of speed readers', getting through War and Peace in twelve days. He's mostly referring to car drivers though, because we train folk can relax with the printed stuff as we coast along without having to worry about traffic lights. I also found an interesting rebuff to the knee jerk accusation that Americans are addicted to oil - "Are we?", said one Extreme Commuter, "Or are we just trying to get to work?" Hmmm.

As always, when I read anything about excessive traffic and moving populations I usually flashback to a particular book by the Danish science fiction writer Niels E Nielsen. But warning, that link won't do you much good if you can't read Danish because it's 'Fra Wikipedia, den frie encyklopædi'. I cannot believe there's no wiki page in English about Nielsen! Or that he isn't more widely known. Alas, a quick Google also revealed that very few of Nielsen's book have been translated into English. It's an absolute scandale. I just assumed he was out there and available for all the world to enjoy.

I read a lot of his work when I was living in Denmark, and his books all made quite an impression on me. There are many many images from his novels that are firmly lodged in my brain, some of them from Vagabondernes Planet (Planet of the Vagabonds, I suppose) published in 1970, which basically has everyone in the world just driving around and around on a grid built between the monocrop fields that feed them, I think - I reserve the right to possibly not be remembering it correctly.

As the years pass, this hellish vision is looking less out there, and more right on our constantly moving doorsteps.

Sci-Fi in the City

Yesterday was another all-dayer in Melbourne. We went to see the Star Voyager: Exploring Space on Screen exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, billed as combining scientific and documentary footage with feature films and video artwork, the Star Voyager exhibition celebrates an enduring fascination with space travel through the imaginations of artists, scientists and astronauts. What with it being the holidays, we took our time peering at the NASA artefacts, pondering the hi tech installation art, marvelling over early recordings of the Transit of Venus which included Captain Cook’s diary entry of the event (what exquisite handwriting! We lost something beautiful there when we took up ballpoints, keyboards and rushing around) donned spectacles and went on a 3D “journey” to Mars where we watched a very cute rover make its lonely way across the vast plains, and laughed at the letters exchanged by Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick as they inched towards their famous collaboration.

There's nothing like watching old science fiction movies and spotting things that have influenced modern film makers (or they've posssibly blatantly ripped off these old/foreign/obscure sources) My favourites were: Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 film ‘Aelita, Queen of Mars’, based on the novel by Alexei Tolstoy and starring Yuliya Solntseva in the title role, because of its great sets and costumes – I mean, just look at that headdress - and the stunning way many of the scenes were shot; Pavel Vladimirovich Klushantsev’s famous 1957 science fact - science fiction documentary hybrid The Road to the Stars because of its amazing special effects, and the fact that it charmingly wears its scientific heart on its sleeve; and as a sentimental third, I’ll include the Danish SF silent movie from 1918 called ‘Himmleskibet’ or 'The Heaven Ship', despite the overwrought acting of the main characters and the embarrassingly Grecian neophytes madly swanning about on the red planet.



As you can see, the good ship Excelsior is indeed a wonder of futuristic engineering. If you want a peek at the movie, there are plenty of scenes from it at this great site.

Afterwards, we headed for a modern cinema and saw Lars Von Trier’s movie Melancholia. I always enjoy a good colliding worlds story, and it made for a nice change that Melancholia didn’t deal with panicked mobs, overwrought generals and cowardly politicians, but pared the scenario down to two sisters dealing with the all consuming effects of living with a mental illness and the poetically-wrought truth that the universe doesn’t give a hoot about our insignificant lives and problems. It also illustrates a trend currently prevalent in television and literary fiction, namely incorporating the trappings and tropes of genre fiction into so-called (don’t get me started) mainstream works. Personally I’m all for cross-pollination and the vigour it produces, but eavesdropping of a few of our fellow viewers revealed that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. As SF goes, the idea of colliding of worlds is a straightforward and quite serious premise/metaphor, but many in our audience boorishly voiced their confusion and opined that it was all a bit silly.

Poor them. They need to vary their intellectual intake, and expand their somewhat limited and exceedingly unimaginative horizons, methinks.

It's beginning to smell a lot like Christmas

Obeying the strict, yuletide tenets of my Danish ancestry, I'm in the middle of a midnight ris á l'amande making session - rice is being cooked, cream is being whipped, almonds are being chopped, and vanilla is being whacked in, giving the whole place a yummy odour.

So, just one more day of Arvo Jobbing, then it's 2 weeks off and the fun part of Xmas starts.

Hyggemad

I've been out for most of this superbly sunny day - shopping, movie (please, don't ask) Bunnings, talking, arvo tea with the cats in the backyard - and now I'm in the middle of hitting the domestic stuff hard (washing, cleaning, cooking up a giant pot of lentil soup for freezing down) so that tomorrow is totally clear for writerly deeds.

I plan to reward myself for these labours in a few hours with Saturday Night Klatkager (you can Youtube an amiable bloke whipping up a batch of this utterly delicious Danish hyggemad (usually translated as comfort food, even though you don't necessarily enjoy it because you're sad. I think of it more as cosy food.) here - is there anything one can't YouTube these days? - though of course the recipes will differ slightly from family to family and across the generations e.g. I use olive oil, which might make purists recoil in horror)*** and a couple of episodes of Stargate Universe, though I'm not sure the word 'reward' applies to the latter. I'm 5 episodes in and the characters still make me grit my teeth. I want horrible things to happen to a few of them. However, I'll bravely forge onwards because I've been informed by a reasonably reliable source (brother) that it all gets better from this point on.

And as an afterthought, I'll tell you what klatkager used to go with so perfectly you'd think the recipe had been invented for them - Xena:Warrior Princess, and before that, Hercules. Ah, those were the days.

*** Sorry - I hope it isn't too hard to sort out all those parentheses. I'd go back and edit, but, as mentioned, I have other stuff to do.

Of course...

...at times like these, one should caste one's mind back to the days when the "old" people in the house next door continually asked me and my sister to close our windows during our opposite-tastes-in-music showdowns, and to recall one's own youthful incomprehension when the police showed up at the door during parties in response to complaints from the neighbours, and to remember the lady downstairs who, on a weekday night when I had a few friends around for a post sports training get-together, phoned me to angrily enquire whether I thought our building was Dyrehavsbakken .

And so it turns, the squeaky wheel of life.

Danish SF

I feel culturally obliged to get myself a copy of this book.

Many Danish authors place their stories in a local setting, and all of them have something to say in addition to “just” being entertaining. You will find philosophical parables, time travels, space yarns, alternate history and much more, as well as stories which in different ways come close to the literary mainstream.

You can read all about it here

Perhaps I should try to get a copy in Danish. I used to read SF in Danish. **

In other news, I finally finished the pink painted rabbit story. It took a bit longer than planned (doesn't it always?) because my great idea, once it left my head, turned into a flat revenge fantasy. So the whole thing was rewritten twice. My bad guy became a not-so-bad-guy, the good guy became a not-so-good-guy, a teeny love story was inserted, futuristic techno stuff was added, and the payback was twisted into something*. The pink painted bunny, however, remained. There are some things you just don't mess with.

* something different.
** I used to write SF in Danish too. I remember a tale about clones, a planet called New Rome, an SF version of Brutus wielding a knife... brilliant stuff!

On Course for Christmas

Today was the last, endlessly long, end-of-the-year slog day at the Arvo Job. I still have to go in for a couple of arvos of mopping up, but I can now turn my attention towards getting the last Christmas shopping done and starting on the ris a' l'amande.

Ah, family traditions. Believe me, a Danish Christmas is not for the faint-hearted. To cope with the preparations, my brothers and sister and I split the cooking tasks. Initially, we renegotiated who was to do what every year – the pork, the red cabbage, the caramel potatoes - but over time, we’ve settled into a routine. I’m the ris a' l'amande maker. It’s not an easy job, and it is not a job you can rush, but when I get it just right, and everyone is scoffing til they burst, aaaah, the triumph.

Alas, however, there is also the possibility of getting it wrong and ruining everyone’s meal...