Erik Stattin - mymarkup.se

(O)utgrundliga markeringar

2026-08-23T00:00:00Z

Nedan markeringar är nog alla gjorda i någon slags skymning, både för att solen står lågt eller kanske till och med försvunnit ned under horisonten, men också för att sömnen är nära och ögonlocken klipper.

Tom McCarthy, Remainder

It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off.

Francis Spufford, Nonesuch

The air was warm and getting warmer. She was wearing the silver dress, bias-cut so it flowed over curves and clung there mermaid-close. It was right for the Savoy, but it needed protecting till she got there. Up to August, hem twitched in her free hand to keep it out of the treads. Up to the late-summer glow in the cheeks and the prickle at the hairline; up to city dust and city speed and city noise. Up to the twenty thousand streets! To the babble of the pavements, to the bray of horns and the bells and the shouts of the news boys selling bad news and the snatches of music from opened doors. To the lively air, with all its smells of petrol and beer and perfume and tobacco and cooking food swirled into motion by the busy passage of human bodies. To the foyers of the theatres, where the crowds were in strict evening dress, and the democratic glamour of the cinemas, where people were dressed and dressed up any way they liked. Up to gold and to gilding, to dear and to cheap delight. Up to life, waiting to be seized, moment by moment, every chance not taken lost forever.

Could she not hear, in the crystal voice, a touch of relish? Wasn’t it orating, just a bit? As if it had not got to use language for a while, maybe, and was making the most of the chance.

‘What if it’s all nonsense?’ he said. ‘Statues. Time machines. Lall trying to change history. What if none of it’s real?’ ‘It is, though,’ said Iris. ‘And is it really any madder or harder to believe than the rest of this?’ She waved at the ripped-paper city, dimming in the early evening light. ‘Look at it,’ she said. ‘Another couple of hours and we’ll all be hiding in holes. And then boys from Hamburg and Munich – nice boys, probably, on the whole, who love their mothers – will fly overhead trying to kill us. It’s a crazy world.’

Ben Lerner, Transcription

“I call her Eva in this book.”

A problem with Freud is he thinks we dream only our own dreams.

Regardless, you have to picture me sitting on the couch, seeing myself through my father’s eyes: ‘My son is eating neon-orange puffed corn, watching a babbling, purple-haired woman opening Mini Mystery Plushies on a tablet with my starving granddaughter.’ I mean, my dad used to go to concerts with Adorno!

Tracy Kidder, House

In the Balkans, as recently as the late 1800s, builders digging a foundation hole would entice a passer-by near so that the innocent victim’s shadow would fall into the excavation. The builders would cover the shadow with a stone, or mark out the shadow’s length and breadth and bury the measurement of it. The ritual ensured the foundation’s durability. The victim, it was thought, would die within the year.

Arthur Bahr, Chasing the Pearl-manuscript

The uncanny is too Freudian and too negative for what I really mean, however, which is more like “supereffability,” a term usefully coined by Cristina Maria Cervone to describe “an understanding of sacred fullness enacted through form.”

For although it is significantly earlier and illustrated quite differently, I will argue that the Pearl-Manuscript achieves similar effects: from its choice and sequencing of texts to its paratext and images, it is a pedagogical compilation in the art of speculation.

Trevor Paglen, How to See Like a Machine

The concept of Umwelt—coined by the early twentieth-century biosemiotician Jakob von Uexküll—describes how the perceptual apparatus of different animals creates a different reality for each of them.

(They even have their own emoji: Unicode character U+1F9FF). [🧿]

Isaac Fitzgerald, American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed

He joined the short-lived Fruitlands utopian experiment in 1843, earning him a place as a character named Moses White in a book about the commune that was written by Amos Bronson Alcott’s daughter, one Louisa May Alcott. Transcendental Wild Oats was originally serially published in a newspaper in 1873, and is best described as a satirical look at male arrogance and female exploitation, and a sharp-tongued critique of, well, utopian communes.

M. John Harrison, The End of Everything

It had been a long time since anyone could make sense of anything.

What were the iGhetti and where had they come from? They had seemed at first like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing: they seemed to be extruded from a space that wasn’t quite in the world. Various simple beliefs surrounded the invasion. Competing authorities associated the iGhetti with dark matter or with the banking crisis of the late 2000s, while others believed it to be less an invasion than a ‘re-enchantment of the world’, a process of spiritual tourism and gentrification pursued by advanced civilisations from a mooted ninth planet. More popularly, they were seen as having ‘come out of the internet’: indeed, this was the favoured theory of the internet itself; the medium still firmly – if a little desperately – casting itself as the message.

You had the sense they were focussed on other projects.

Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

‘We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value. The heroes at Troy fought for a phantom Helen, according to Stesichorus. Vain wars for phantom goods. I hope you will allow yourself plenty of reflections on human vanity. People lie so, even we old men do.

‘The sea, the sea, yes,’ James went on. ‘Did you know that Plato was descended from Poseidon on his father’s side? Do you have porpoises, seals?’

Claudia Piñeiro, Cathedrals

Even though he’d been a professor of history, he read widely in the areas of philosophy, psychology, anthropology, biology, theology. My grandfather was interested in everything. My grandmother always complained that, after retiring, he wasted all his time reading and hiding from her behind his books. I would’ve done the same if I were him. From him I inherited my voracious appetite for reading.

It’s unimaginable how one hand could carve wood with such precision that the folds of a dress look so realistic.

‘I’m not going to lie to you. From now on, whatever you don’t want to forget you’re going to have to write down, do you understand? Write down what I’m about to say to you,’ he instructed, and then dictated: ‘In order to remember something, you’re going to have to write it down.’ And I wrote it down. ‘You may manage to recover some memories; information travels many pathways, there are some shortcuts. But the main route is broken.’ I nodded as if I understood what he was telling me. And I wrote it down, confused, dizzy, and angry. ‘In order to remember something, you have to write it down.’ ‘There are shortcuts.’ ‘I’m not going to lie to you.’ ‘Main route broken.’ The doctor, the notebook, the diagnosis, his advice. I can repeat what he said because it’s written down and I can read it, on the first page of that maroon notebook with the black butterfly, the first of so many, of different sizes and cover designs, that would follow. There are some words and phrases that, also, I took the time to highlight in fluorescent colours – pink, green, or yellow – important things that I might want to refer back to in the near future. The highlighted phrases moved, over time, to a favourites folder on my computer. Some things I’ve highlighted are ‘anterograde amnesia’, ‘semantic memory’, ‘hippocampus’, ‘left side’. Also ‘Ana’, ‘murdered?’, ‘Lía/ring’, ‘Mateo’ (along with a photo, to sensorially associate the name and face), ‘Alfredo’. The highlighted words I copy from notebook to notebook, when one gets filled up and I begin the next, so I don’t have to go back so far to find it.

Nathaniel Rich, Cloudthief

“A group of rats is called a mischief.” He was very good on animal groupings, Ces. A crash of rhinoceroses, a flamboyance of flamingos, a troubling of goldfish

Seule au fond du gouffre (Alone at the Bottom of the Abyss) was composed of diary entries written by Le Guen during her sojourn in an underground cave in the remote uplands of Southern France. The cover showed Le Guen rappelling into the cave’s mouth in a blue jumpsuit and headlamp, taking a final upward glance. Beneath her lay total darkness. That was me, I thought grandly, descending into the abyss… though of course I had no idea how far the metaphor would extend.

Le Guen’s sense of time swiftly deteriorated underground, as the date stamps on her journal entries indicate: “I think it’s August 15 … I’ve persuaded myself that it’s August 17 … I believe that it’s August 19 … August 18? Surely not!” After more than a month in darkness she began referring to herself as a person hors du temps—outside of time. The absence of sunlight demolished her circadian rhythms; she began sleeping for eighteen hours at a time and staying awake just as long. When she finally surfaced from her swallow hole, collapsing into her husband’s arms, Véronique Le Guen believed that she had been underground for forty-two days. It had been one hundred and eleven. Two “days” further into Le Guen’s diary—“I don’t really dread solitude, so much as idleness”

The only untidy presence was the overcrammed bookshelf that served as the bed’s headboard. It held titles in French, Italian, Spanish, German, and a neat row of leather-bound journals—a small, hardcover design that I had favored back when I could afford to buy frivolous things. A small tablet, propped on a Chinese-English dictionary, streamed in gray scale the front desk’s surveillance feed.

I wanted to understand how a person could start again, could create a life outside of the world, a life of freedom and self-reliance: an American kind of life.

Daniel Mason, Country People: A Novel

That was before Kate’s sustained remission, before natalizumab, before rituximab, those drugs with names like Milton’s angels.

In the family, getting distracted was known as “being visited by the Person from Porlock,” a literary reference that softened the self-recrimination that usually accompanied procrastination. Olive was five when Miles had first explained how Coleridge, one day, awaking after having dreamed the whole of Kubla Khan, had begun to write it down when he was called from his cottage “by a person on business from Porlock,” and detained for an hour. Upon returning to his writing desk, he found he had lost the train of the poem, a masterpiece that would never be completed. Since then, “Person from Porlock” had come to mean someone who interrupted the creative process.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Beginning Place

He was hungry. He was always hungry. He was never exactly hungry, but always wanting to eat.

Makenna Goodman, Helen of Nowhere

Houses can get lonely too, you know.

It’s not that I’m against the universities, but I just think we need to ask ourselves more often, what good are they?

They’re better than the universities, professor, better than all those buildings and all those ideas. But the thing is, a murmuration looks like the plague, too, coming for you. They look like locusts, but it’s so beautiful, like this proof of wild things having an intelligence far greater than ours. The way they move, like a swarm of bees. You know what I mean, like traffic. Have you ever driven in traffic and thought to yourself, it’s a miracle there aren’t more accidents? I think about that every time I’m in traffic. I think about it when I’m driving and another car comes at me from the other direction, and we pass each other and we’re a foot apart, separated by one line. It’s the most natural thing in the world, hurtling past each other the way we do, it’s beautiful chaos, and most of the time we are okay. Then sometimes we do collide. But starlings never collide.

It’s curious that you should be interested in this life alongside those big ideas of yours. I’ve never read your work, but I looked you up, just a little. I know the media just wants to sell an ad, so I didn’t read too deep or too far into things. We all need to leave old lives because we outgrow them, is what you said. ‘We all need to experience ourselves anew.’ You wrote about the idea of new starts. You wrote about the idea of being reborn. I read that piece of yours, the idea of helping others to give birth to something. I guess it’s not true that I haven’t read your work. Sometimes reading is pointless, though, and it’s better just to take things in. You learn a lot by just looking and seeing.

Inside every person is a landscape, Helen would say. Why look at your reflection in search of the truth? We are more than just our puny selves, and mirrors are all about puniness.

You are always without time, with too much work, regardless of how much time or how little work you actually have. It’s because you struggle with purpose, baby. You do things because you have to, but that’s the only reason. If you didn’t need to do things, you wouldn’t bother doing anything at all. What kind of life is that? A life without meaning?

That’s why, in terms of energy, leaving the city would be a positive move for you. You need support, you need nature, you’re needing more of a natural kind of energy, and you’re not getting it. It’s the internal energy that is within each of us. Part of you, part of your teaching has been to put as much money aside as you can so that you can arrive at a moment and say, “Now I’m ready, I’m going to do it.” But who is “I”?

Jag hittade på glasblommorna i mitt huvud

2026-08-07T00:00:00Z

Det finns en lustig detalj i Marta Pérez-Carbonells roman I Made You Up Inside My Head som berör de där glasblommorna från Dresden och vad jag uppfattar som en blinkning till Ben Lerners Transcription. Berättelsen utspelar sig bland annat på en tågresa mellan London och Edinburgh, där huvudpersonen Alicia har kommit i slang med två amerikaner. Under samtalet sägs följande:

Yeah, I know. One of life's little coincidences; read it in a novel and you wouldn't believe it. Anyway, we would eat these sandwiches by the river and after the conference, we'd go and visit one of Cambridge's museums. I remember the look of surprise on Hans's face when he saw the collection of glass flowers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, said Terry.

Bo interrupted his reverie with a question for me. 'Have you ever been?' he asked. 'Do you know that collection?'

I said that I didn't, but that I had read about it in a novel not too long ago.

Här blir man ju fundersam på om det är en ren fiktion att det finns en roman där muséet nämns, eller om det är så att författaren faktiskt menar Transcription, en bok som kom ut i april i år (Pérez-Carbonells i slutet av juli). Det passande är ju att Alicia arbetar som översättare, liksom författaren. Jag kan dock inte se att Pérez-Carbonell har översatt Lerner till spanska tidigare, men kanske kan det vara så att hon översatt Transcription och därmed har hunnit få in den här hänvisningen?

En annan Lerner-koppling (om än mindre kittlande) är att Alicia vid ett tillfälle befinner sig på Atocha-tågstationen i Madrid, vilken också förekommer i titeln på Ben Lerners roman Leaving Atocha Station. En bok jag inte läst, men som jag förstår handlar om en amerikansk poet som kommer till Spanien på ett stipendium.

Kriget mot metaforerna

2026-08-06T00:00:00Z

Can you rewire your brain?

Popular wisdom holds we can ‘rewire’ our brains: after a stroke, after trauma, after learning a new skill, even with 10 minutes a day on the right app. The phrase is everywhere, offering something most of us want to believe: that when the brain suffers an assault, it can be restored with mechanical precision. But ‘rewiring’ is a risky metaphor. It borrows its confidence from engineering, where a faulty system can be repaired by swapping out the right component; it also smuggles that confidence into biology, where change is slower, messier and often incomplete. The phrase has become a cultural mantra that is easier to comprehend than the scientific term, neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to change and form new neural connections throughout life.

War in the Abstract: The Rise and Consequences of Militarized Language in Scientific Communication

Scientists do not wage war, yet they have come to write as if they did. They speak of “wars” on cancer and dementia, of immune cells that “patrol” the body for “invaders,” of “magic bullets” against tumors, and of “arms races” between hosts and pathogens. Intuitively, war metaphors may persist in scientific writing because authors perceive them as effective rhetorical instruments.

Varia – juli 2026

2026-07-19T00:00:00Z

Från en intervju med Joakim Haugland, innehavare av skivbolaget Smalltown Supersound (min fetstil nedan):

I’m not a musician myself. I’ve never played an instrument in my life. But for me, it’s a meeting of sounds and souls in the moment. That’s what I love so much about free jazz. Right now I’m talking to Mats Gustafsson and he has the second oldest instrument in the world, a flute that is 30,000 years old. It’s a long story, how he got it, but it’s checked by professors in China and it’s real, and he’s going to record an album on that. And what I’m thinking about is, I love the basics of how humans connected with each other through music. And I think that that connection is still there with free jazz.

Claire L. Evans besöker en forskarkonferens på Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics och jag fastnade för det hon säger om metaforer inom vetenskap:

After all my years spent talking with scientists, I’m still never quite sure when it’s appropriate to speak in metaphor. As Philip Ball observes, there are plenty of metaphors in science. Molecules recruit one another, for example. Cells signal to one another. The so-called central dogma of molecular biology is that DNA transcribes genetic instructions onto messenger RNA, which then translate them into proteins. These are accepted analogies, so absorbed into the language of biology as to be effectively invisible. Others, more emergent, remain hotly contentious.

Philip Ball, som hänvisas till, skriver så här:

Much of the important work done by metaphor and narrative in science happens, so to speak, out of sight: it tends to come in the form of traditions and customs that are inherited through the culture of science and, like many cultural norms, rarely questioned. I believe that this aspect of science cannot and should not be subjected to some kind of rigorous testing and scrutiny in the way that theories are; by their very nature, metaphors and narratives need to be afforded space for ambiguity, for open-endedness, and for plurality. Rather, the process needs to happen “in the open” and with recognition that these tools are not simply pedagogical but shape the way scientific questions are framed, priorities set, and resources allocated.

Mer från Claire L. Evans: Historien om James McConnells forskning på en slags plattmaskar på 1960-talet och hur hans teorier om var minnet sitter föll i glömska och/eller motbevisades (sitter det i cellerna eller mellan cellerna?), för att ändå fortsatt vara av intresse att undersöka i andra organismer, är kul läsning.

Jag minns att jag läste Celine Nguyens "research as leisure activity" och tyckte den var sympatisk. Därför roligt att se hur hon och Laurel Schwults till veckan som kommer anordnar en workshop på temat/med "metoden":

There’s a special quality that comes from starting projects, and a different, also special quality that comes from finishing them. Because of that, we’d like this class to be a container for making something (even if it’s small!) in a single weekend.

Elvia Wilk om "nattlogik" i berättelser...

The whole time I have been thinking about Kelly Link’s concept of Nighttime Logic. The idea is that there is a kind of story logic that adheres neither to the sense-making of waking life nor the surreality of dream life, but produces meaning in a different way. It’s not irrational or unreal, but it’s not on the surface level of reality. Something else is ticking the clock of the story. It lives somewhere between the indeterminacy of the dream space and the overdeterminacy of waking life. This seems like how Mark Fisher describes the Eerie: as a disjuncture between cause and effect, where the events are related, but we aren’t sure exactly how.

...vilket fick mig att tänka på François Jacobs idé om "nattvetenskap" som det sammanfattas av Yanai & Lercher:

As Jacob says: “Night science wanders blind. It hesitates, stumbles, recoils, sweats, wakes with a start. Doubting everything, it is forever trying to find itself, question itself, pull itself back together. Night science is a sort of workshop of the possible where what will become the building material of science is worked out”

En bild med förklaring:

The popping-out model of day science and night science. Day thinking proceeds in logical steps, and thus only ideas that are closely related to the current hypothesis can realistically be reached (symbolized by the isolated valleys in the lower part of the picture). But one can pop out to the much more open night science world, where leaps among ideas are made possible by intuition, associative thinking, unexplained observations, and loosely applied principles from other fields. When a new idea has been generated, one can pop back into the day below and test it efficiently using day science methods

De har återskapat Umberto Ecos boksamling på 32 000 volymer i ett palats i Milano. Automatiskt översatt från Elle Italia:

Entering the Eco Library means then going through a cartography of knowledge that shuns every compartmentalization. Semiotics and philosophy coexist with the Middle Ages, linguistics with esotericism, popular fiction with Aristotle, comics with school, art catalogs with mass culture. It is the same method that crossed his novels: from the Name of the Rose to the Pendulum of Foucault, the high and popular culture are never antagonistic, but parts of the same living organism. The choice to faithfully recreate the original organization of the house of Milan tells much more than just archival respect. It means recognizing that thought also possesses a spatial dimension.

Varia – juni 2026

2026-06-24T00:00:00Z

Historikern Carlo Ginzburg gick nyligen bort. Jag har haft en PDF av hans essä "Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method" liggande ett tag (förmodligen var det i Peter Cornells Paradisets vägar som den nämndes). Jag nämner det mest för att jag ska komma ihåg att läsa. #researchasleisureactivity

Jag har fastnat för Gelli Hahas låt "Bounce House" från albumet Switcheroo. Den har en somrig strut och här är ett nyligt live-framförande:

Man kan också musiksätta sommaren med den här mixen från Love Injection.

Deborah Khodanovich behövde ett eget citeringsystem för sin avhandling – Relational Citation Style - för att "all knowledge is communally generation" och att det då behövs det sätt att citera "co-authored , oral, and transmitted knowledge". Här är en uppsättning av 9 oortodoxa men rimliga sätt att hänvisa till källor:

Direct Conversation
Secondary Transmission
Unknown Source
Co-authored Knowledge
Common Knowledge
Published Sources
Recommended Source
Published Gossip (min favorit!)
Mediated Citation

En tjusig liten bok om det har hon gjort också, liksom att det är på gång att man ska kunna ladda ned ett typsnitt för egen användning.

Läser om Hanna Nordenhöks nya roman Det underjordiska biblioteket:

En kvinna vandrar genom ett ödelagt landskap i en nära framtid tillsammans med andra överlevande efter en namnlös katastrof. Hon måste ta sig till någon hon älskar men hindras från att komma fram av inre och yttre krafter till synes bortom hennes kontroll. På vägen möter hon två barn, som hon binds till som av osynliga trådar. Tillsammans har de att överleva i en allt mer mardrömslik och ombytlig terräng.

Jag kommer att tänka på Vägen, men också – eftersom jag har den lite färskt i huvudet då jag börjat läsa den – på M. John Harrisons The End of Everything. Plockat från en recension:

It’s the near future, familiar yet estranged. There has been a catastrophe, but it’s already old news and, in any case, the news media seem to have collapsed. [...] The main characters are beachcomber Phillip Tennent and his elderly aunt Marnie. Phillip sells his lucrative finds on what we presume to be the hidden market, though how much of the legal economy still works is unclear. Marnie paints, and defends her terraced townhouse against predators and vandals. Police are never mentioned. Order, such as it is, is maintained through vestigial community cohesion and survival of the toughest.

(Note to self: det är något med det här akvatiska som minner om Ian McEwans What Can We Know).

Från en intervju med Harrison:

Is this the end of everything? What is the end of everything? What’s a disaster, for instance? Since the 1950s, in the aftermath of WW2, we’ve thought of catastrophe as bounded: disaster as a single event which plays through and has a beginning and an end. Essentially, as an invitation to repair the damage and go back to the ground state. I suddenly thought to myself, “This is not how disasters actually happen.” We’re in the middle of two or three now. They’re running concurrently, and they will probably never end. It seems to me that in reality what you do with a disaster is to get used to it. In the UK, the governmental responses to the eco-disaster are that of acclimatization, accommodation. We no longer talk about changing things. We no longer talk about avoiding the consequences. We talk about learning to live with it. To me, there are certain kinds of accommodation, particularly middle-class ones, which are essentially the attempt to ignore what’s going on. I see no difference between the two, so The End of Everything as a novel is really about people trying to continue to live as they’ve always lived, when, really, they haven’t got a clue what’s happening to them.

Två sommardrinkar:

Körsbärskalimotxko

1 citronskiva, urpressad men inkluderad; 40 ml rött vin; 30 ml Cynar (eller Campari tänker jag; min Cynar tog slut nu men jag beställde genast en ny pga gillar den kronärtskocksbaserade bitterheten); 130 ml körsbärscola (kanske inte zero/light-versionen). Med is.

Lambrusco Spritz

45 ml av en amaro (jag hade bara Fernet-Branca men det finns nog andra som passar bättre), 15 ml färsk grapefruktjuice, 90 ml torr eller halvtorr Lambrusco (jag hade Ca' Vedole på Lambrusco di Sorbara (Nr 233901)), toppa med 30 ml bubbelvatten, i med en grapefruktklyfta och 1-3 Castelvetrano-oliver.

Råkade komma över en "retraction notice" från forskarna till en Nature-artikel från 2022. Låtsas inte ens förstå förklaringen, men jag tänker att det finns ett frö till en sci-fi-berättelse här:

The authors have retracted this article after identifying a crucial error: due to an unusual calibration problem, CHIME’s digital beams were incorrectly pointed when FRB 20191221A was detected. The sub-second periodicity that they associated with the putative fast radio burst FRB 20191221A was, in reality, a periodic signal from the known Galactic pulsar PSR J0248 + 6021. This directly impacts the conclusions drawn about the periodicity of FRB 20191221A and its possible origins.

Lärde mig i alla fall om CHIME-experimentet i kanadensiska British Columbia. Beskrivet så här:

CHIME is a novel radio telescope that has no moving parts. Originally conceived to map the most abundant element in the universe – hydrogen – over a good fraction of the observable universe, this unusual telescope is optimized to have a high “mapping speed”, which requires a large instantaneous field of view (~200 square degrees) and broad frequency coverage (400-800 MHz). The digitized signals collected by CHIME will be processed to form a 3-dimensional map of hydrogen density, which will be used to measure the expansion history of the universe. At the same time, these signals can be combed for fast, transient radio emission, making CHIME a unique telescope for discovering new “Fast Radio Bursts” and for monitoring many pulsars on a daily basis.

Min fetstil eftersom jag tyckte det stod ut: tekniskt-vetenskapliga beskrivningar och så...BOOM..."measure the expansion history of the universe". Där har vi också litteratur!

Kollapsologi på Kamchatka

2026-06-14T00:00:00Z

Sophie Pinkham skriver om franske antropologen Nastassja Martin. Två av den senares böcker finns på engelska: In the Eye of the Wild (2021; urspr. 2019) och East of Dreams (2026; urspr. 2022). I den första boken berättar Martin om sina fältstudier hos ursprungsbefolkningen på Kamchatka-halvön, bland annat om hennes nära-döden-upplevelse med en björn:

It recounts Martin’s near-fatal fight with a bear in Kamchatka. She survived by stabbing the animal in the leg with an ice axe, but lost part of her jaw and suffered severe scarring. After a harrowing series of operations in a Russian military hospital and then in France, she returned to Kamchatka as soon as she was physically able. There she rejoined her adopted family of Even people, who had returned to the forest after the collapse of the USSR; the daughter of the family smuggled Martin through a military checkpoint in the trunk of her car.

Den andra boken "doubles as an anthropological manifesto for the age of climate crisis" och Pinkham lyfter fram hur Martins naivitet gör henne blind inför Even-folkets materiella förutsättningar när hon hellre fokuserar på deras animism och symboliska flykt in i skogen undan klimatkrisen:

She is perplexed by the resistance of Daria’s son Ivan and his cousin when she insists on accompanying them on a fishing trip one day. The reason soon becomes clear: she watches them catch a huge number of salmon, slice out all the roe for sale on the black market and leave the bodies on the forest floor to rot. The fish heads do not point east; there is no ceremony to honour their souls. Ivan and his cousin need cash. The fact that the Even routinely hide or lie about their fishing and hunting to the authorities, which impose unrealistically low hunting quotas, comes as a revelation to Martin, even though the navigation of corrupt bureaucracy and unfollowable rules is a fixture of contemporary Russian life, as it was of Soviet life and of imperial Russian life before it. It is painful to watch her question Ivan and the other men until they grudgingly admit that they lied on their paperwork, or that the area’s animals are disappearing thanks to uncontrolled poaching – including their own.

2026-05-31T00:00:00Z

Sommarens drink är körsbärskalimotxo: 1 citronskiva, urpressad men inkluderad; 40 ml rött vin; 30 ml Cynar (eller Campari tänker jag; min Cynar tog slut nu men jag beställde genast en ny pga gillar den kronärtskocksbaserade bitterheten); 130 ml körsbärscola (kanske inte zero/light-versionen). Med is.

Mer glasblommor

2026-04-25T00:00:00Z

Christian Lorentzen om Transcription:

The interchangeable quality of the fictional elements in Lerner’s novels signals an anxiety about his own artistic method, as it’s both the way his art is made and the thing that most troubles his characters, the sense that they are disposable and could easily be replaced. What puts the narrator in hospital for ten days but the despair that he’s been replaced by a Spaniard? Yet the method remains fertile for Lerner, his poetry and novels recording devices more sensitive than the glass flowers for projecting ourselves into the future – us, or people a lot like us.

Den vilda trädgården

2026-04-19T00:00:00Z

(Källa för bilden)

Jag kommer tillbaka till min gamla dröm om Walter Benjamin och en notering jag hade från Hisham Matars roman My Friends. Den här trädgården som nämns – Jardin sauvage Saint-Vincent – låter som den perfekta miljön att förankra berättelsen:

It was a sunny day. He suggested we walk to the Jardin sauvage Saint-Vincent, a small park behind the Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre. “A wild garden,” he said. “Almost always closed, but shall we try?”

He proceeded to tell me about the garden, how it was part of an old piece of fallow land, that the trees, plants, and flowers were all self-sown. “A little wild meadow locked inside the city.”

Apropå Benjamin så kom en bok förra året ut i Tyskland – Das Pariser Adressbuch. Eine Biographie des Exils im Spiegel – av Georg Wiesing-Brandes. Den verkar utgå ifrån Benjamins adressbok under perioden han bodde i Paris och inventerar det nätverk av personer som han interagerade med. Översatt från en recension:

Historien om hans exil har berättats många gånger – men aldrig som här. Ty vad som nykert presenterar sig som "Den parisiska adressboken" är den grundligaste, mångsidigaste och färgrikaste biografi över Benjamins parisår som någonsin funnits. Källan är ett litet grönt adressbok i läder, nu förvarad i Benjamin-arkivet i Berlin, i det för Benjamin typiska miniatyrformatet sju gånger 4,4 centimeter, inköpt i början av exilen i ett parisiskt pappershandel. Bara 25 sidor innehåller anteckningar, resten är tomt. Men vad litteraturvetaren Georg Wiesing-Brandes gör av dessa sidor är fenomenalt: varje adress av de drygt trehundra en ledtråd, varje namn en historia.

Från en annan recension:

So entstehen in gänzlich unterschiedlicher Länge Dutzende biografische Einträge – neben den ‚üblichen Verdächtigen‘ wie Adorno, Arendt, Brecht und Horkheimer auch zu Johannes R. Becher und persönlichen Freunden wie Alfred Cohn oder zum Arzt Camille Dausse. Das Pariser Exil, weit über Benjamin hinaus, gewinnt so an enormer detailreicher Tiefe – mitnichten war Benjamin hier einsam oder isoliert, im Gegenteil. Man kann ihn als gut vernetzt sehen. Es war jedoch seine Eigenart, die verschiedenen Kreise seiner Freunde, Bekannten und Kontakte voneinander isoliert zu halten, auch wenn es viele Überlappungen gab. Er nahm sowohl persönlich als auch brieflich Anteil an politischen, literarischen, persönlichen Zusammentreffen, Initiativen, Auseinandersetzungen und Diskussionen. Nicht alle der aufgeführten Personen hat er persönlich getroffen – bei einigen lässt sich gar nicht ausmachen, warum sie im Adressbuch standen, bei wenigen ist außer den Namen nichts Weiteres bekannt. Man erfährt viel Persönliches über die Beteiligten – von aufblühenden und zerbrechenden Bekannt- und Liebschaften über Befindlichkeiten, Drogenerfahrungen, tiefe Krisen bis hin zu politischen Entwicklungen, dramatischen Schicksalen, dem spurlosen Verschwinden und Reisen in den noch freien Teilen Europas (oder ins stalinistische Russland, wo so einige dann erschossen werden). Benjamin rang um jede bezahlte Veröffentlichung und versuchte, ins Französische übersetzt zu werden, – denn die wirtschaftliche Existenz, nicht nur seine, war mühselig, immer am Rande vollkommener Mittellosigkeit. Der Autor berichtet vom Entstehen und Zergehen von Zeitungsprojekten, von denen einige auch nur im Namen Bestand hatten, auch verschiedene politische wie literarische Organisationsversuche werden geschildert.

Glasblommorna från Dresden

2026-04-12T00:00:00Z

I Ben Lerners Transcription besöker berättaren Harvard Museum of Natural History med dess samling av blommor och frukter i glas, skapade av Leopold och Rudolf Blaschka. Det är som en hel estetisk filosofi inbäddad i de här två korta styckena:

We entered a large room full of dark wooden display cases containing thousands of anatomically perfect flowers in perpetual bloom, but also models of fruit in intricate, perpetual decay: strawberries turning ghostly with mold, peaches collapsing inwards on a branch, leaves curing at their edges. (I loved the names of the diseases on the placards, and read them aloud to Anisa as we moved among the specimens: brown rot, soft rot, blue mold, stony pit, pear scab, fire blight, leaft spot.)

I was astonished by what I saw. I couldn't quite believe that this moth orcchid was glass, that this pear blossom was lampwork, that these objects had been blown and shaped and painted, that these impossibly delicate things were the result of a thousand rapid choices and adjustments, movements of the hand. (That I'd recently read about the firebombing of Dresden in one of my classes with Thomas, seen slide of the ruined city, added another layer of pathos to the brittle flowers.) I joked with Anisa that these must be actual plants that some conceptual artist was claiming were glass—they probably replaces them each night—but the joke masked the flowering of a new sense: I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instans and as artificial the next, a kind of duck-rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed. And I carried this new way of looking, or this new hinge in my looking, outside the museum: when my sister dragged me camping, for instance, I was typically unmoved by "unspoiled" mountain views; after the glass flowers, I would see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touched or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on. It was with Anisa that I first became conscious of this quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child's game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually I'd call this "fiction."

Uppdatering: vid sidan att man fick lära sig lite om vilka personer som kan ligga bakom Thomas i Transcription – Keith och Rosmarie Waldrop, förutom Alexander Kluge – så förekommer också scenen från museet i Maggie Millners recension hos n+1:

Distinguishing the world from simulations of the world, the virtual from the real—it’s a tough job for anyone, let alone for those of us who spend our lives writing texts in the service of “expression” or “creativity.” When your livelihood is language, it becomes almost impossible to tell where experience ends and representation begins. And when you’re a writer famous enough that your own work intervenes on the culture in a significant way, and changes the material and interpersonal conditions of your existence—well, you can go ahead and forget about separating art from life. Seen in that light, the instability of Lerner’s prose is not just a stylistic choice but also a painstaking effort at mimesis; the more perplexity we feel when we read it, the more accurately it reproduces the endlessly recursive experience of being a writer (or at least the kind of writer Lerner is). Here’s a telling sentence from his introduction to the 2019 reissue of Rosmarie’s novel, The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter: “For a poet, ‘realism’ is at least as much about the reality of the work itself, its status as a made thing (a ‘machine made out of words,’ as William Carlos Williams put it) as it is about the vividness of the world that the words denote.”