Reykjavík Grapevine - 21.05.2010, Side 30

18
Madonna
Restorante Italiano
The best part of Italy is in Reykjavík
www.madonna.is
Extremely reasonable prices
Relaxed and romantic atmosphere
Madonna Rauðarárstíg 27-29 445-9500

Woolens factory store,
located in Vik
Víkurprjón ehf
Phone: 487-1250
www.vikwool.is
Genuine woolen goods,
made in Iceland_______
Also wide selection
of souvenirs
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 06 — 2010
The Lord thought about Pompeii
and wondered why he did not do this
more often. From the perspective of
infinity, the days all tended to roll
into one, but this was one he could
remember clearly.
In the early morning, he had ob-
served a group of children setting
fire to an anthill just outside of Her-
culeaum. There seemed to be no pur-
pose to their activity, other than hear-
ing the sound the insects made when
they burst. Perhaps this was the sum
of all human endeavour, and the Lord
wanted to play too.
He lit up the sky and all those un-
derneath it. Snap, crackle, then pop.
Flesh melted away and the bones
made a pleasing sound when they
cracked in the heat.
One might be forgiven for think-
ing that it was in retribution for the
anthill that the children of Pompeii
were reduced to cinders. Not so, for
from the perspective of heaven there
was very little difference between the
two. Others surmised that it was be-
cause of its greed that Pompeii was
destroyed. There was some truth in
this. If there was something the Lord
detested, it was greed. This was not
because of any notion of right or
wrong, indeed he cared as little for
one as for the other. The Lord’s dis-
like for greed was purely aesthetic.
Greed rarely created anything; it left
nothing behind by those who suc-
cumbed to it.
The Renaissance Italians had
killed each other over access to land
and gold, to be sure, but they also
competed in sculpture, in painting,
in every form of art. The Sistine
Chapel had endured long after per-
sonal fortunes and their owners were
ground to dust. The petty kings of
Germany had schemed against each
other, but their attempts to outdo one
another also took the form of musi-
cal appreciation. To this day, when-
ever the Lord listened to a recital of
Mozart’s Requiem, even he felt com-
pelled to believe in the possibility
of an afterlife for creatures who had
created something so enduring. Not
only the Italians and the Germans
and the French had created some-
thing that could be called culture,
even the English had something ap-
proaching it in between their colonial
exploits.
But these Icelanders had never
created anything. They were com-
petitive to a fault, but they only com-
peted in the collection of money and
the consumption of alcohol. They
bragged about both, but were good
at neither. Their buildings were a re-
f lection of their bank accounts, vast
and empty.
A more patient God would have wait-
ed to find out what happens to ma-
terialists stripped of material things,
to see if they would repent and turn
on to a better path. But this was not
a patient God. He was a creator God,
impulsive and intemperate. He had
created mankind in his own image,
curious and at times cruel, but al-
ways with the ability to dream. He
could not stand a people without
imagination.
When the Pompeiians gave up on
trying to outdo the Greeks in terms
of culture and turned to the pursuit
of money instead, he grew bored with
them. As it turned out, their demise
was far more interesting in visual
terms than their existence had been.
Though not as enduring as feats of
creation such as Mount Everest or
Kilimanjaro, the Lord still thought of
the pillar of smoke rising out of Ve-
suvius as one of his major works, a
wonderful piece of performance art.
But how to do away with Iceland?
Volcanoes were his weapon of choice
when it came to destroying civilisa-
tions, and he had placed plenty of
them in the vicinity for precisely
this purpose. Still, the idea of re-
peating himself bothered him. He
had unleashed the fires in Iceland
once before, and even that had not
been much of an improvement on
the Vesuvius eruption. Was it true
which the philosophers said, that his
best works were behind him? It was
all well and good to destroy cultures
through sound and fury, but he was
past that now. He wanted a more ma-
ture offering. He wanted it all to sig-
nify something.
He thought long and hard on the
subject, but nothing came to him.
Nothing refused to turn into some-
thing. This had never happened
before, and for the very first time,
he felt old. He needed inspiration.
That’s all that was missing.
God decided to explore his canvas.
Like most visitors, he found much to
admire. It was not quite as polished
as the White Cliffs of Dover, or as
meticulously crafted as the Greek
Islands, but it had a certain rough
charm to it. Iceland had been created
during one of his more experimental
phases. He had to admit that though
he hadn’t put much thought into it
at the time, the outcome had been
better than he expected. The wild
combination of styles that reminded
some of a granite Sahara and others
of the moon convinced him that the
country might be worth keeping.
It was when traversing the east
coast of Iceland that the original com-
poser of words, the one whom some
claimed was the word itself, was at a
loss for things to say. His highlands,
which he now recalled he had put
precisely there to be out of harms’
way when the humans came, had
been partially ruined. The vandals
had dug dams in them and poured
mounds of concrete over until there
was nothing left to view but the col-
lecting of króna. This was precisely
why he detested greed so much.
The earth started trembling un-
der the Lord’s feet. He would have
run the remains of the island into
the sea then and there, had not the
mountains silently reminded him
that his quarrel was not with the
land, but its inhabitants. He had to
erase them somehow, without dam-
aging the canvas.
God Returns To Iceland pt. 2:
Literature | Short story
VALuR GuNNARSSON
ILLuSTRATION bY INGA MARÍA
bRYNJARSDóTTIR
This is the second section of a four part short story by former Grapevine
editor Valur Gunnarsson. We have read the entire thing, and we can tell you
right off the bat that it is a pretty damn awesome read. So stay tuned for THE
FOUR SPIRITS in our next issue.
Ghosts
of Pompeii
American New York Times columnist and
best-selling author, essayist, feminist, and
activist Barbara Ehrenreich will be the
keynote speaker at the Icelandic Network-
ing Conference, which will be held May
27-29 at Bifröst University. Widely consid-
ered one of the greatest, most provocative
social critics of our times, Barbara is the
author of 16 books, including Nickel and
Dimed, which won the Los Angeles Times
Book Prize and was named one of the de-
cade's top ten works of journalism by the
Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at
NYU. Another speaker at the conference
is Sigríður Benediktsdóttir, one of the au-
thors of Alþingi's investigative report into
Iceland's bank and economic collapse.
Barbara is renowned for her campaign
for women's rights. She holds a Ph.D. in bi-
ology from The Rockefeller University, but
early on dedicated her critical and research
skills to writing. She was a regular contrib-
utor to Gloria Steinem's Ms. Magazine, is a
columnist for The New York Times, Time
magazine, Harper's, The Nation, and is a
frequent and popular TV talk show guest.
She is widely regarded for her biting, witty
writing style; she has been called "the
Thorstein Veblen of the 21st century," and
The London Times called her the Jonathan
Swift of the 90s for her sharp insights and
exposes of the excesses and injustice borne
by those on capitalism's underside.
In writing Nickel and Dimed, Bar-
bara—inspired in part by the rhetoric sur-
rounding welfare reform, which promised
that a job—any job—can be the ticket to
a better life—decided to join the millions
of Americans who work full-time, year-
round, for poverty-level wages. But how
does anyone survive, let alone prosper,
on $6 an hour? To find out, Barbara left
her home, took the cheapest lodgings she
could find, and accepted whatever jobs
she was offered. Moving from Florida to
Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a wait-
ress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a
nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales
clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crum-
bling residential motels. Very quickly, she
discovered that no job is truly "unskilled,"
that even the lowliest occupations require
exhausting mental and muscular ef-
fort. She also learned that one job is not
enough; you need at least two if you intend
to live indoors, and demonstrated in often
heart-wrenching details how employers
and managers often manipulate and take
advantage of workers' poverty and desper-
ate circumstances.
In her latest book, Bright-sided, Bar-
bara exposes the crippling downsides of
the "positive-thinking" industry: personal
self-blame and national denial used – at
the cost of clarity, common sense, and real-
ism – to brush off poverty, disease, and un-
employment to rationalize a system where
all the rewards go to those at the top. The
theme of this year's Networking Confer-
ence – Empowering Women is Courage,
Communication, and Change of Mind.
Sigríður Benediktsdóttir, the other key-
note speaker, will discuss courage in the
wake of the events leading up to and caus-
ing Iceland's economic and bank collapse.
In addition to the keynote speakers, thirty
other women will speak at the conference
on various issues.
The Networking Conference, which
was founded by Dr. Herdís Þorgeirsdóttir,
professor of law, is by far the most popu-
lar and inf luential conference that takes
place in Iceland. It was first held in 2004;
in 2008 the conference was attended by
500 women. The conference agenda and
registration, as well as information about
lodging, is available at www.bifrost.is
Article | Conference
barbara Ehrenreich
Is coming!
ÍRIS ERLINGSDóTTIR
SIGRID ESTRADA