Lisbeth Salander strikes again

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is a film which exists in two versions, a Swedish one from 2009 and an American one from 2011. I just finished watching the latter. I expected it to be a heavy revision with all the action set in the United States. It isn´t. In fact, the two films are very similar. Both are set in Sweden, one of the main actors in the US version is Swedish (Stellan Skarsgård) and many of the plot elements are the same. The only anomaly is that the newspapers and TV broadcasts are in English in the US version – despite the plot being set in Sweden!

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is extremely brutal. Brace yourself for rape, torture and a sadistic serial killer who inherited the trade from his father. The main character, borderline clinical feminist vigilante Lisbeth Salander, is very unrealistic. She comes across as a kind of Marvel Comics super-hero, mysteriously suspended in our reality. As behooves a film based on a Swedish original, the consensual sex is very explicit. Often with said Salander taking top position. A side note for American viewers: Lindholm, Furugård and Engdahl, three mysterious men mentioned at one point in this production, were Swedish fascist leaders.

The story is based on the earlier Swedish film, which in turn is based on the novel “Män som hatar kvinnor” by the late Stieg Larsson. The novel forms the first part of a trilogy, known as “Millennium”. All three novels have been adapted for the movie screen in Sweden. Larsson could best be described as a left-wing conspiracy theorist. The themes explored in his novels (and in the films) include sexual abuse, upper class cults, Nazis, psychiatric abuse, “official” corruption, organized crime and secret service conspiracies. It´s not a positive view of Swedish (or global) society! Unfortunately, I never read the novels, and therefore can´t compare them with the films. A difference I did notice is that Lisbeth Salander is even more brutal in the Swedish films than in the American adaptation!

Not one of my favorites, despite my “feminist” convictions. I think these productions border violent porn. But yes, both the novels and the films have proved to be extremely popular, including internationally. I wonder whether it´s the shock factor, or if people actually reflect deeply over the implicit message…

Salvation in 40 seconds

Sadhguru (Jaggi Vasudev) claims that you can be saved from samsara during the 40 last seconds of your life. Presumably you have to die in Kashi (alias Varanasi or Benares) at the banks of the Ganges river in India. 

During the last 40 second of an individual´s life, he experiences his entire life - and several previous lifetimes - in rapid succession. This leads to an enormous suffering. If you can somehow become "aware" during these 40 seconds, you will reach liberation, even if you lived your entire life in ignorance. 

This process is known as Bhairavi Yatana, and was instituted by Shiva (whose most ferocious form is called Bhairava). 

Can´t vouch for the truth of these claims, LOL, but note the interesting similarities with modern ideas of near-death experiences (NDEs), and more ancient ideas about purgatory and the like. 

Could this *at the very least* be a genuine psychological experience? And if so, what does it mean? 

Beyond Thermidor

“Franska revolutionen” is a relatively short book in Swedish about the French Revolution. The author is Dick Harrison. For obvious reasons, it´s mostly of interest to Swedish readers! The book is intended as an introduction to the topic, but without dumbing down too much. I think the author succeeds in his aim. Harrison does a good job summarizing the course of the revolution, which began in 1789 and (on Harrison´s reckoning) ended with Napoleon´s Brumaire coup in 1799. Personally, I wouldn´t end the story until the Bourbon Restoration, but YMMV.

The author emphasizes the material and political causes of the revolution: the fiscal crisis after the French intervention on the side of the Patriots in North America (ironic, since the French were on the winning side!), the seething discontent among a super-exploited peasantry, the constant sabotage of King Louis XVI´s reign by the nobility in the local “parlements”, and the growing social weight of the Third Estate, which was nevertheless excluded from all meaningful political influence. This is a refreshing contrast to those who claim “Enlightenment values” in the abstract was the main cause of the revolution. One thing I didn´t know before is that the “parlements” also regrouped covert revolutionaries, who sided with the nobility for purely tactical reasons, since they too wanted to undermine the royal regime.

As for the revolution itself, Harrison does a good job describing the various factions and their conflicts. However, I think he makes one factual error: surely the “Indulgents” were the *moderate* faction of the Jacobins? I also think he misses to mention Lafayatte´s defection. Or was that me? A little known fact emphasized by the author is that it was the “moderate” Girondins who wanted France to embark on a policy of wars of intervention, with the express purpose of weeding out domestic traitors. While Harrison (a leftist pacifist) tries his best to be objective, it *is* difficult not to paint Robespierre as a bloodthirsty fanatic obsessed with purges and “purity”. Most popularized treatments of the French revolution end with Thermidor, i.e. Robespierre´s downfall and execution in 1794.

Harrison takes us further, describing the continued conflicts between “moderates”, Jacobins and sans-culottes (with Napoleon hardly even waiting in the wings) during the Directory. I found this interesting, since it shows that the “right-ward moving drift” of the revolution did *not* become inevitable after the overthrow of Robespierre, there being several points at which the radical leftists could have retaken power. Robespierre wasn´t the “Lenin” of the French revolution, but rather its “Bernard Coard”. I´m not really a super-radical leftist, but I just couldn´t help myself pointing this out!

With that, I end this little review of “Franska revolutionen”.

The world is a dollhouse

“Dockskåp - en värld i miniatyr” is one of the strangest books I´ve read lately. Actually, I stopped reading it half-way, realizing that dollhouses simply aint my thang. Yes, dollhouses. The book, published in 1991 by Lena Lidbeck and Stefan Nilsson, really is about famous (and some not-so-famous) such. I suppose it could of some interest if you´re first language is Swedish and your main love in life is making or buying miniatures of furniture and utensils. No hard feelings, by the way, it *is* both weird and impressive that the color pics in this volume, which seemingly show real rooms in real houses, really are of miniature ditto! Some of the dollhouses also have quite the story behind them.

Thus, there is Titania´s Palace, built by Sir Nevile Wilkinson, a British landowner living on Ireland, for his daughter Guendolen. As a child, Guendolen would play alone in the family´s big park, imagining herself to be surrounded by fairies. She eventually gave them names. Thus, Titania was the fairy queen (named after a character in a Shakespeare play). After both father and daughter had supposedly seen this fairy, or felt her presence, the father became obsessed with building a “palace” (or rather dollhouse) for Titania and her family. The dollhouse was officially “opened” in 1922 by British queen consort Mary of Teck, but Wilkinson continued to add to it until his death in 1940. After various peregrinations, the dollhouse was bought by Lego and ended up at Legoland in Denmark!

Interestingly, Mary also owned a famous dollhouse, known simply as Queen Mary´s Dolls´ House, built by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Some of the miniature books in this dollhouse were specially commissioned from famous authors and thus contain original stories, albeit very short ones, including one by Arthur Conan Doyle!

Next, there is the Stettheimer Dollhouse, built by rich American socialite Carrie Stettheimer. Artists who befriended the Stettheimer family contributed paintings, including a miniature version of “Nude Descending a Staircase” actually made by Marcel Duchamp. The dolls are caricatures of real people from the New York jet set, including Olga de Meyer (who was rumored to be the bastard daughter of King Edward VII of Britain), Surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchew (oh, that guy) and Carrie Stettheimer herself. The biggest sensation is a miniature elevator or lift which actually works. Apparently, some of the manikin artwork adorning the walls of the dollhouse is pretty frivolous, including a painting of Noah dressed for a rainy day, while one of Noah´s daughters wears a swimsuit!

“Dockskåp” also contain several chapters on the history of dollhouses. As can be seen already from the 20^th century examples above, dollhouses haven´t always been intended for children. The book contains a detailed, and almost incomprehensible, description of a curiosity cabinet gifted to Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus during his intervention on the Protestant side in the Thirty Year War. The year was 1632 and the place was Augsburg. The maker of the cabinet was the famous Philipp Hainhofer. Further, there are the so-called Nuremberg kitchens, which were intended for children as a pedagogical device insofar as girls needed to learn the basics of cooking and home economy. And yes, they really were from Nürnberg.

Being published in 1991, the book naturally lacks the “woke” angle considered necessary today. It´s easy to see that the dollhouses faithfully reproduce class society, with (often female) servants in the kitchen or dining room, expensive rooms for the bourgeois or aristocratic house-owners, and everyone being lily White. On the stylistic side, on the other hand, dollhouses are apparently pretty eclectic, often combining very different fashions, or being built in pure fantasy styles. Only with some difficulty did the authors manage to find dollhouses that could represent “real” artistic or design styles, such as Neo-Rococo or Functionalism.

With that, I end this strange review…

Ripping Mama

Time to stop "tone policing" the populists, eh, dear liberals? Or do you disavow your mama Nancy Pelosi for ripping up Donald Trump´s State of the Union speech in full view of the cameras? LOL. Just another day in Amerikwan politix... 

Last Night of the Proms

A classic. Watch all of it! Nigel Farage´s farewell speech to the European Union. The place is the European Parliament. Shows all we need to know about this globalist occupation government... 

A study in Theosophy

“The Coming of the Fairies” by famous British writer Arthur Conan Doyle (which should be procured in an illustrated edition) is a book originally published in 1922. It´s one of the strangest books ever written, certainly the strangest from the pen of Doyle, otherwise best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Doyle was a Spiritualist and was on good terms with the Theosophical Society, leading British Theosophist Edward Gardner in particular. It was through Gardner that Doyle became embroiled in the curious affair of the “Cottingley Fairies”. In 1917, two girls named Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths from Cottingley in Yorkshire took two sensational photos with their father´s camera. One shows a gnome, the other a number of dancing fairies. The photos came to the attention of Doyle in 1920. The girls took three other photos of the fairies later the same year, with a camera borrowed from Gardner. All photos are included in “The Coming of the Fairies”, which also includes Doyle´s original article about the affair in Strand magazine.

Both Doyle and Gardner strongly believed in the authenticity of the photos, Doyle in particular thinking he had made a world-historic discovery of some sort. Supposed experts had told Doyle that neither photos nor negatives showed any evidence of tampering (this was true – the “fairies” were probably real cardboard figures!), but also that the fairies showed evidence of motion (probably not true). Some skeptic arguments were easily dispensed with – for instance, the surroundings at Cottingley really did look like in the photos, one of Elsie´s hands really was very large, etc. Thus, this was not evidence for tampering. Other skeptic objections should have been stronger, such as the “Parisian coiffure” of the dancing fairies. 

Why on earth would Yorkshire fairies look like stereotyped French dancers from the early 20^th century? Why did the fairies only show themselves on sunny days, and only to Frances and Elsie? Also, Elsie could paint and worked in a Christmas card factory! It wasn´t until 1983 that the two cousins finally admitted that the photos were faked. Today, it´s difficult to understand how Doyle could have been taken in so easily. The photos really are “too good to be true” (or even “too bad to be true”), but perhaps that´s why Doyle fell for it? (Addendum: A commentator pointed out in the thread below that according to some sources, Frances always insisted that the fifth photo was genuine.) 

What really surprised me when reading Doyle´s little volume was how seriously he treats the Theosophical view of the fairy. The book includes lengthy digressions written by Gardner or C W Leadbeater, one of the top leaders of the Theosophists whom Doyle had met while visiting Australia (where the British Leadbeater was “bishop” of the small “Liberal Catholic Church”). Gardner claims that the fairy are on the same evolutionary line as the butterflies and the moths, and that they “create” flowery plants and make them alive – a very original version of the argument from intelligent design! Leadbeater by contrast claims that the fairies have evolved from grasses and cereals through ants and bees?! Doyle and Gardner had also let a Theosophical clairvoyant, Geoffrey Hodson (not named in the book), visit Cottingley and write a report on whatever he saw there – and he saw plenty. Apparently, the area around the house where Frances and Elsie were staying was teeming with fairies, gnomes, sylphs, water-spirits and what not, all invisible to the naked eye. Hodson would later write a book all his own, reviewed by me elsewhere on this blog.

What makes the whole story even stranger is that fairies *don´t* look like Parisian dancers or humanoid butterflies according to traditional fairy lore from the British Isles, dutifully collected by another Theosophist, Walter Evans-Wentz, in his classic “The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries”.

It´s almost as if some kind of trickster archetype may be at work here…

Finis coronat opus

“Birds of the Seychelles” is a Princeton field guide written by Adrian Skerret and Ian Bullock, with illustrations by Tony Disley. It was published in 2001. The Seychelles are an island-nation in the Indian Ocean, off the east coast of Africa. Why would a bird-watcher go there? The authors point to three reasons. First, there are interesting endemics on the so-called granitic islands (or granitics), since these are the oldest oceanic islands still in existence. They were formed 65 million years ago! There are currently 12 or 16 endemics on the Seychelles, depending on how you count, including the Aldabra Rail, the last surviving flightless bird on any Indian Ocean archipelago. Second, the Seychelles are home to enormous colonies of seabirds. Third, billions of birds migrate across the Indian Ocean every year, many of them flying off course and ending up on the Seychelles.

I admit that the guide does look bewildering to a non-birdwatcher firmly seated in his arm-chair in Europe. Old acquaintances from my backyard, such as the Grey Heron, the Mallard or the House Sparrow, co-exist with exotics like the Madagascar Fody (what´s a fody?), the Seychelles Magpie-Robin (which follows giant tortoises and really do look like a manikin magpie) or the Seychelles Black Parrot (which is actually brown). Weirdly, only two corvids have managed to get their feathered backsides on to these distant shores, the Pied Crow and the House Crow specifically. Quite the disappointment since corvids are my favorite bird group…

The field guide contains descriptions of the Seychelles and various important bird-watching sites on the islands. The number of bird species covered is 250. Color plates and species presentations are not on facing pages. The guide seems to be pretty exhaustive and serious, with information on juveniles, similar species (to aid identification) and current conservation status. Even extinct species have been included in the field guide! English and French vernacular names for each bird are given, but the Creole names are mostly constructed by the authors themselves in a weird display of cultural imperialism. The book also contain a major factual error: it claims that the Seychelles were separated from the nearest landmass “before mammals evolved”, but mammals of course evolved earlier than 65 million years ago.  

Still, probably indispensable if you want to visit the most successful nation in Africa…

Slutsnackat

Skrämmande artikel från Aftonbladet. Det viktiga med artikeln är *inte* att Japan bygger 22 nya kolkraftverk, utan att Kina bygger 500. Detta innebär i sin tur att *ingenting Europa gör* kan klimatkompensera för utvecklingen i Asien. 

Av detta kan man dra vissa slutsatser, som AB dock inte vill dra. 

Exempelvis att det i så fall är irrationellt att satsa på utsläppsminskningar i Europa (och Sverige). Eller att enda sättet att rädda världen är att göra något drastiskt åt Mittens Rike... 

Förhoppningsvis riktigt drastiska investeringar i Carbon Storage & Capture, eller kanske kärnkraft. Annars kan det här sluta väldigt, väldigt illa. 

Vi får hoppas att klimatforskarna helt enkelt har fel, och att nästa sommar blir svalare. Fett mycket svalare!

Japan bygger 22 nya kolkraftverk

Mello börjar likna Iowa

Kommer till Mello? 

Okej, nu säger SVT plötsligt att Thorsten Flinck kan få tävla i finalen "om dom fallit" (och han blir dömd till 25 to life, eller vad). Men vad är då poängen med att ta in Jan Johansen? Det här börjar likna röstkaoset i Iowa. Eller röstfusket? Dax för Christer Björkman och Jonas Nordin att rycka ut igen, känns det som.