Reykjavík Grapevine - 08.01.2010, Blaðsíða 30

The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 01 — 2010
30
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl’s third novel, Gæska
(Kindness), has just been published by Mál &
menning.
Poetry is a culture heavily
impregnated with the
idolisation of poets. Popular
knowledge of poetry stops
where the anecdotes about poets end and
the poetry begins. We remember Rimbaud
as the original rockstar, vomiting all over
the Paris culture elite. We remember
Ginsberg as the mad fairy who blew people
in parties and undressed on stage. Li Po as
the alcoholic who drowned while trying to
embrace the ref lection of the moon in the
river. Sylvia Plath for being suicidal. Ted
Hughes for being her husband. Gertrude
Stein for her dinner parties. We remember
poets for being crazy, for being loners, bitter
or ecstatic, for their failures more than their
victories, for their eccentricities more than
their attempts at finding common human
traits. Not counting a few sound bites etched
into the mental gravestones of our mutual
consciousness (“I saw the best minds of my
generation” … and “I am large, I contain
multitudes” and the like) we hardly ever
touch on their poetry.
Having soon spent a decade in Icelandic
literary cliques I can confirm that this is not
limited to the society of dead (famous) poets.
Literary enthusiasts gossip about living poets
and writers, big and small, like there’s no
tomorrow. And culture-reportage in Iceland
usually consists of asking a writer or artist
what his or her “dream-weekend” might be,
what they have in their pockets, or chit-chat
about politics and social matters that may or
may not have anything to do with the artist’s
subject matter. What you soon realise when
you first get interviewed for a book you’ve
written is that the reporter in question
will, in 9 cases out of 10, not have read your
book. Even the critique, the reviews in the
newspapers or other media, is inherently
focused on the writer’s person: he or she has
grown, he or she has lost his or her touch, he
or she is venturing where no he-or-she has
ventured before, he or she is old-fashioned,
he or she is revolutionary. He or she should’ve
taken more time. The list of clichés is longer,
but as it induces involuntary vomiting in the
columnist, I will stop here.
The French literary-critic Roland Barthes
wrote a famous essay in the late sixties
entitled “The Death of the Author”. In the
essay Barthes railed against the idea that we
read the text in the context of its author. The
text should be free from whoever the author
is, says Barthes, and in fact there is no actual
“author”, only a “scriptor” who produces the
work but does not explain it, does not have
the (sole) right to unentangle his or her
symbolic efforts—or indeed any other part of
the work.
This may be a creative way to
approach a poem, although perhaps a bit
fundamentalist for most people’s taste. A
poet’s life may be relevant to his or her work,
either the methods of composition or his or
her maternal relationship—whatever it is.
Reading is a free world. And poets should
maybe not be the ones deciding what readers
see in their works or how they should be read.
But I am confident that most of my fellow
poets would be overjoyed if the media, when
discussing the life, methods and opinions
of the poet, would be so kind as to do so in
the context of the poet’s work, rather than
the context of the contents of the poet’s
pockets.
For Icelanders, 2009 was in many ways
a god-awful year. Still, there seems to be
a hidden link between grim nightlife,
gruesome partying and a bad national
temperament-rate. So it’s easy to assert
that Grapevine’s favorite pastime –
getting shitfaced – had a strong year. A lot
of new venues, bars and clubs opened up,
and a lot of them went belly up, and in this
endless turbulence of opening parties
and bankruptcy wakes we stumbled
upon some true gems. Alcohol-serving,
debauchery-friendly gems.
It’s a strenuous task to sum up every
shindig triumphs of the year, so we’ll
have to make do with mentioning only
the crème de la crème extravaganzas.
cONSTANT PARTY-THROWERS
First, let’s look at the constant parties
through the year. Grapevine’s winner of
the best bar of 2009, Karamba, started off
with a blast, where experienced hooligans
hoofed it alongside their youngster
protégés 'til their heels were sore, but as
summer drew to a close, the DJs started
becoming looser and when a certain
kid’s birthday-tunes became one of
their hottest crowd-pleasers, the seniors
seemed to disappear completely, leaving
the floor to jumping high-school chums.
Fortunately, Bakkus came to the
rescue, bringing their notorious
afterparties to the table. Once the clock
turned 1AM (or 5AM) the good people at
Bakkus would lock their doors, pull the
drapes and distribute ashtrays, New York-
style. Even loudening the music. So, you
can imagine how boozy things got.
Festival-wise, things started off rather
slow in 2009 as ludicrous concepts such
as ‘the January-Detox’ and other such
nonsense tends to impede things. But
as the sun started honoring us with its
presence for more than three hours per
day, people started itching for a good,
carefree bender. Although yours truly
wasn’t present at the Easter giant in the
depravity league, its attendants have
bugged me with idiotic stories of the
great Aldrei Fór Ég Suður festival of 2009:
How they got stuck in a locked cab with
a Robert de Niro-like boozed up maniac
behind the wheel, how they ended up
pants-less in some random house or how
they received their best-ever blowjob in
the trunk of an SUV. So yeah, things took
a turn over Easter.
FESTIVAL MAYHEM
After the post-Easter hiatus, the 24-hour
sunlight lead to the crazy Seyðisfjörður/
Norðfjörður festival combo of Eistnaflug
and LungA. I’d rather not put the glory
of the uncrowned wingding king and
queen of the East fjords into words but
their reign consists amongst others of
impelled sea-swimming, underage sex-
orgies and a great consumption of alleged
narcotics.
As autumn fell, it was as toxic fumes
started swirling over the city, inebriating
every inhabitant and in the haze we
diligently survived the stupor of RIFF,
Sequences and Iceland Airwaves. What
begun as fancy champagne-sipping
fêtes slowly morphed into uncountable
smoky afterparties. Don’t get me wrong
though, this glorious season of muddle is
Christmas for us nightlife strongholds –
but once the fumes clear, the hangovers
last until the actual Christmas.
Finally, we have the big wrap-up:
New Year’s Eve. It’s always sort of a
disappointment; however realistic you
are about the night being overestimated
there’s always the longing for an epic
New Year’s tale lurking at the bottom
of your heart. The bars were battling
for the crowds this year, as every venue
advertised more than ever the crazy bash
that was going to take place within their
perimeters. I avoided being stuck in a
bar, so I witnessed a lot of home-cooked
craziness, but in the end my companions
couldn’t resist peeking into Bakkus’
first foray into the world of New Year’s
mania. And it was undeniably a great
way to end the party mayhem of 2009 in
a champagne pit full of whacks breaking
their New Year’s vows in a ritual-like
frenzy, lighting flares and popping pills.
Good Riddance.
Poetry | Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl
Party | Sigurður Kjartan Kristinsson
The Death Of A Poem
Whooping It Up In 2009
Opinion | Art
As I said last issue: To un-
derstand anything, you must
understand everything.
In early 2009, I went to an ex-
hibition at the Norwegian National Gal-
lery. The exhibit was devoted to Munch’s
painting Det Syke Barn (The Sick Child).
Not only did they show various versions
of the picture, but they also exhibited
other works from the 1880s in general,
other paintings by Munch that dealt with
the artist’s fascination with sickness and
death, and other works that portrayed
the dying. A whole room was devoted
to the history of medicine during the
period. The point was clear: the only
way to truly understand a work of art
is to understand everything around it,
the whole world view of the times at the
time of its creation.
Once you start looking for some-
thing, you find evidence of it every-
where. A review of The Oxford History
of Western Music in The Economist
reads: “We are presented not with a
miraculous chain of great composers
producing timeless masterpieces from
nowhere. Rather, musical works and
stylistic movements are presented in
context so that, for example, the origins
of the dynamic style of Mozart and
Haydn are shown to lie in Italian opera
buffa rather than in the architecturally
static idiom of Bach and Handel.”
Acknowledging a master’s influenc-
es is not exactly a groundbreaking idea.
The notion that the artist is impacted
by everything, including politics, social
issues, even the medical science of his
day is, in the current climate, almost
revolutionary.
What I am getting at owes more than
a little to chaos theory. Let’s recap.
The most popular illustration of
Chaos Theory is what is known as The
Butterfly Effect. A butterfly flapping its
wings in Brazil will put in action a tiny
current that eventually becomes a tor-
nado in Texas. Locally, we might say that
a pebble falling thrown off a mountain
could spur an avalanche.
This might be hard to live with, but
this is actually how we live our lives.
There are moments, such as starting a
new job, graduating or getting married,
where we realise that nothing will be
the same from now on. But every day is
filled with little decisions that determine
the course of the rest of our lives. The
most obvious example is going out on
a Friday night, where we may meet
someone who will change everyday
thereafter. Icelandic bars might be seen
as one big drunken example of chaos
theory, much more so than for example
dating sites, where everything is at least
intentional.
There is no master plan. When set
in motion, things are often propelled
by various unintended forces and have
unforeseen consequences. There is no
one directing anything, but that doesn’t
mean no one is responsible. Quite the
opposite. Everything impacts everything
else, so the people who make the big-
gest decisions affect the whole game,
whether they intend to or not.
For Icelanders today, such a theory
makes sense. Many refer to a “kerfis-
villa,” a systemic failure, in Iceland’s
economy. Wherever we localise the
initial cause as Milton Friedman’s lecture
in 1984, Davíð Oddsson coming to pow-
er in 1991, the privatisation of the banks
after 1999, it is obvious that the results
have been far reaching. They altered not
just the course of the economy, but even
how almost the entire nation thought
and acted. It should be equally obvious
that none of this was inevitable, that
things could have gone in a myriad of
different directions. As, indeed, they can
today.
Freedom, from the communes to the
banks
The implications of this are far reaching,
especially in a small society. How we act
every day has potentially far-reaching
consequences. Someone who runs
a company sets the game rules for a
large number of people, who in turn
influence friends and relatives. People
were constantly asked to overstep their
moral boundaries, until these eventually
faded away. In this way, the free market
ideology reached everywhere in the
space of two decades and eventually led
to collapse.
The core ideal of libertarianism was
the idea of personal freedom, something
they borrowed from the hippies while
shedding all the tiresome peace and
love business. The idea of freedom was
eventually taken to mean that nobody
had to take any responsibility for their
actions. You could, say, advertise
unhealthy food to children, but the chil-
dren, or their parents, were responsible
if they bought it. You could advertise
bogus accounts, but responsibility for
putting money into it lay with the con-
sumer. Eventually, this meant you could
lie, but if someone believed you, the fault
was entirely theirs. Chaos theory takes
the opposite view. Since everything
is influenced by everything else, the
responsibility must lie with the liar.
So, we move from nothing matters,
to everything matters. Post-modernism
has run its course. It took a hit on 9/11,
and eventually collapsed completely
with the banks. We need new ideas for a
new age. - VALUR GUNNARSSON
The Meaning Of Chaos
So much for post-modernism. What next? Grapevine Recaps All Yesterday’s Parties