Summer — summer — summer! 
The soundless footsteps on the grass! 






John Galsworthy: Indian Summer of a Forsyte 

thursday links (sculptures, whistling, falling in love)

A song for warm summer days.


A sweet Brazilian short film.


How to find out who you really are?


Children meeting sculptures.




(Days are warm and windy. I've been working and travelling by train and sleeping in. And playing the ukulele and listening to a lot of bossa nova. I've been reading The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides and Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, and rereading Katherine Mansfield's short stories and a lot of Salinger. What have you been reading lately?)

what we're afraid of when we talk about anne frank

Last week I went on a school trip to Auschwitz Birkenau. This is my final essay of the course (and also my final essay written for school ever). I thought some of you might enjoy this. Here goes. 

What We're Afraid of When We Talk About Anne Frank 

"Because of a religious education, my sister and I were raised

 with this idea of a looming second Holocaust. We would play the 

Who Will Hide Me game, or the Righteous Gentile game." 

Nathan Englander (Guardian Books Podcast: Anne Frank, 24.2.2012) 

"No, it's not a game. It's just what we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank." 

Nathan Englander: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Knopf, 2012)

In the short story, two Jewish couples engage in a macabre thought experiment: in the case of a second Holocaust, who would protect their family. Who would hide them, bring them food, who would face the risk of death for their sake?



I had been thinking for quite a while about my feelings regarding the Holocaust, this interest bordering on the obsessive, this umbilical cord I've built between myself and the victims. It is of course understandable that Western culture keeps returning to the Holocaust in art and in research. But what about it reels us in, us as individuals? Why do we flock to cinemas to watch the latest Holocaust film, why do we keep reading the latest books and articles? Why do we keep talking about Anne Frank?

According to author Nathan Englander, we treat the Holocaust as a symbol. ”What we’re talking about today is the legacy of the Holocaust, the idea of it. It’s not just that there’s the historical thing, the genocide; there are these pathologies behind it, this idea of how fear works. People were comfortable in Berlin and in Paris [during the Second World War]. Your world can snap at any time and just become a world of betrayal.” 

The Holocaust has become the ultimatum of our capacity for evil, ground zero for immorality. We use it as a measuring stick for our own moral integrity. This comes down to two questions that we could call games if they were not so endlessly serious. We have Englander's question of who would save us, and we have the possibly more dangerous one: who would we save, and would we really?




And in the end, it is not about who would help us, but about who would not. It is not about who we would help, it is about the possibility of remaining passive, of being a silent witness -- and worse still, of becoming a perpetrator, a killer. 

Talking about the Holocaust hands us anger, fear and sorrow. These are the feelings we acknowledge. There remains a feeling we rarely address, a feeling that hides so deep within us we rarely notice it: guilt. 

When we talk about Anne Frank, who has become a symbol of purity and innocence, despite her unabashed mischievousness, we feel the same secret guilt. We fear our own darknesses, our own weaknesses. We fear the way we cling to our safety, our loved ones, our comfort and our routines, over helping the persecuted. We fear the version of us who avoids the gaze of the homeless man asking for money, who stays silent when a person of colour is treated to a round of verbal abuse on the bus, who does not join Gay Pride parades, who cannot converse casually with a physically disabled person. We look at the smiling young girl in the black and white photograph, and in her eyes we find an accusation we have no answer for. 



I do not know if there are people in the world for whom being good comes naturally. I do not think so. Doing the right thing is a choice. The Righteous among the Nations recognised in their reflections their capacity for evil, they looked their own darknesses in the eye and turned away. There are no good people. There are only those who are courageous and honest enough to do the right thing, and those who are not. 

It is dangerous to think of people as either good or bad. It is just as dangerous to use the Holocaust as our moral thermometer. Remembering the Holocaust is vastly important, but we should not let it overshadow the discrimination and the disadvantaged of our time. It is too easy to repeat the mantra of Never Again and neglect our mistakes and our hidden persecution. It is too easy to light candles at Holocaust memorials, to read Anne Frank's diary until the pages crumble, to cry furiously during the end credits of yet another film, it is too easy to beg for forgiveness for sins we have not committed. We have the responsibility of recognising the sins of our time, so that the generations to come will not have to feel our guilt.

  

For Grace, After a Party by Frank O'Hara

Meditations in an Emergency, 1957

monday links (virginia woolf, finishing books, dancing ballet, racing bikes)

Picture from the Orient Express by the wonderful Hotze Eisma.

Oh goodness, it's been a while. But here they are, a compilation of my online findings. Enjoy.



A brief, beautiful piece on the room in which Virginia Woolf used to write.

Confessions of a Cycle Messenger by Jon Day. 

(Stunning. If there is one link you should click out of all of these, it's this one.) 

Ballet in slow motion. 

If you, like me, are bad at reading books all the way through, try reading Why Finish Books? by Tim Parks for reassurance. (From now on, I might even be able to admit I quit reading a book three-quarters in.)

Laura Brady on her "not a real job" job.  

Also, the third issue of the online quarterly The Junket (also known as my one true online love) is due to appear any moment. (Yes, I have been refreshing the page for a while now.) Make sure you check it out. 

     




We conversed in low whispers, as if afraid to wake up the land. 

Joseph Conrad: Youth

sporadic and ambiguous thoughts

I've begun so many posts lately, it seems that's all I do these days. Begin and let go, give up and give in.

The libraries of Helsinki are packed these days, full of students and anxiety and the soft thrum of hopelessness. We'll brave this, I like to think. But I do worry, rather too much.

I listen to Bright Eyes and the Cure and to old old songs by Regina Spektor. These are things I listened to when I was fifteen or maybe sixteen and I don't know what that says about me. Maybe I'm regressing. I'm also rereading all the Murakami I first delved into at the age of fourteen. And I also find it a bit disconcerting how I can only talk about the songs I listen to and the books I read, not much about anything that's actually happening.

There's the constant undertone of I Should Be Studying and it's just terrifying. Only a bit over a week to go and I can hardly believe it.

I had a high fever a few days back. I haven't had a proper fever since the age of ten. I had completely forgotten how it feels.

Also, some of my friends are on the verge of being terrifyingly happy and some are trying to fight through things and some are still waiting for everything. And I'm thinking every day about how I will finish school and leave. Where I'll go to, I don't know, but I know I'll miss them more than I can even imagine right now. Sometimes I get these surprising attacks of nighttime fondness, when I think of how much I'd like to fix everything in their lives that is broken.

Mostly I try to focus on my breathing. And sometimes I feel light, despite the way the snow is too bright on sunny mornings. Conor Oberst and Regina will tide me through this.

I will love you no matter how many mistakes I make when trying to reduce fractions, and no matter how difficult it is to memorize the periodic table. I will love you as the manatee loves the head of lettuce and as the dark spot loves the leopard, as the leech loves the ankle of a wader and as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture. I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms. I never want to be away from you again, except at work, in the restroom or when one of us is at a movie the other does not want to see. 

Lemony Snicket: The Beatrice Letters

Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time. 

Zadie Smith: White Teeth

(So you know how I'm in love with her sentences?) 

The past is always tense and the future, perfect. 

Zadie Smith: White Teeth 

(A bit too clever and punny but oh goodness I love it anyway.)

One could almost climb into his sentences, one could almost fall asleep in them. 

Zadie Smith: White Teeth

never hurry, never worry

There's a hiccup in my swagger and worries in my way, although this Christmas has been simply divine.

I've been eating a truly indecent amount and reading almost constantly. (Books, after all, are the very best of presents. I was lucky enough to receive a glorious take on Austen by P.D. James, some Stephen Fry, some highly praised new Finnish novels and almost a thousand pages of brand spanking new Murakami. Oh yes.)

And maybe the most surprising and welcome present of all was a short trip to Amsterdam next week. (Thanks, Mum.) Van Gogh, Anne Frank, here I come.


(Also, if anyone feels like squeeing over the Christmas special of Downton Abbey with me, feel free to do so in the comments. My feelings over Matthew and Mary are full of flailing and smishing and clutching at my heart. Mary Crawley is my favourite character ever in the history of all things and Michelle Dockery is just stunning. Oh show, how I adore you.) 

Picture by the ever-delightful Nan Lawson. 

a very merry

I'm non-religious to my bones, but there's something about this hymn (especially when it's sung by the glorious Sufjan Stevens and accompanied by a banjo) that makes me weak in the knees and strong in the heart.

May you all have the very best of Christmases.

the eve of the eve

I thought these pictures from Ezra Jack Keats's children's book (published in 1962) might bring holiday cheer to one and all.

The snow here melted as swiftly as it snowed down. But I've been making mince pies and playing Christmas songs, and I've hung my stocking already, and nothing will discourage me now.

I'm on holiday and there's finally no shortage of time. There are hours for sleep and for reading and cooking and simply being. I've banished all thoughts of revision and work out of my head, for just a while.

Today's Christmas song is called Come On! Let's Boogey to the Elf Dance! and it is beautiful. Because what's Christmas without Sufjan Stevens?

monday links (unspoken truths, last christmas, naming novels)

Only a few days to go till Christmas. Today I traipsed down to a Christmas market to get some aniseed and finger all the handmade decorations. It was crowded but calm and cheerful and oh goodness I love this time of year, despite the dark and the wet and the still-no-snow.

On with the links, not all of which are Christmas-y, I swear.

The late, great Christopher Hitchens on illness and voice. 

For those of you who need a pick-me-up for the final days of hurry and worry, and really don't feel like listening to Christmas songs anymore, something entirely different. For those of you who adore slightly corny Christmas songs, here's Florence Welch singing Last Christmas.

Why Finnish is cooler than English. Why, thank you. 

Olivia Cole on Frank O'Hara's glorious love poem To the Harbormaster. And writer Shalom Auslander on naming novels.

great places

Congratulations!

Today is your day. 

You're off to Great Places! 

You're off and away! 

You have brains in your head. 

You have feet in your shoes. 

You can steer yourself 

any direction you choose. 

You're on your own. And you know what you know. 

And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go. 

Dr. Seuss: Oh, the Places You'll Go!

sundays

(Reading Brideshead Revisited and Lolita and listening to this.)

monday links (street musicians, tears, line breaks, hogwarts)

I must say, my finds this week are spectacular. Honestly though. I'm so excited about all of these.

(Also: I'm on a huge book binge right now, after a self-imposed dry spell due to all that studying. Currently I'm halfway through Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and accompanying that with Vladimir Nabokov's lectures on the novel. Also on my bedside table are Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety and Chuck Palahniuk's Choke. I'm also rereading Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne because they are undoubtedly the greatest love letters ever written. )



And after this geeky display, on we go with the links.


Julie Lansom's photography is simply stunning.

The upcoming documentary about the  making of the final Harry Potter films seems set to make us all cry. 

An amazing article about a street musician, expanding into a meditation of what art really means these days and how it should be presented.

Weekend, a new film by Andrew Haigh.

(This. Just. You know?)

Sometimes a poem comes along that makes me physically ill, the words hitting my lungs like punches. 

So read this. At least for the truly excellent demonstration of a line break, 

so good it would make the most solid prosaist cry and dig out their hidden lyrical endeavours for a review. 

James Franco on Gus Van Sant, youth and death.

preparations

A weekend, thank goodness. Still no snow, but new winter boots and cutting up old maps for a school project. And lots of shits and giggles. I'm rereading (or maybe rerererereading) Salinger and Jansson and Nabokov to prepare myself for winter. Any wintry book recommendations? (Anything involving snow, ice and/or moonlight is most welcome.)



(Maybe I just don't know how to live properly, or how to be young either. I thrive in this melancholy in-between of autumn and winter like no other season. The sun sets after four in the afternoon and evenings are painted over with a brush of muted tiredness. Summers especially make me feel woefully inadequate, with my endless lack of spontaneity and heavy suitcase of what-ifs. My mother calls me a child of winter, not only because I was born in February, but because I'm so at home in the long months of snow.) 

parties

(Sometimes when I'm tired down to my bones, I reach out for Katherine Mansfield's 

The Garden Party or F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or Virginia Woolf's 

Mrs Dalloway and, despite their literary merits and stunning depth, choose to 

focus on the sparklingly expectant feeling of getting ready for a party. 

Because there are few mornings as hopeful as the ones before parties.)