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  • Repetition Compulsion

    “We have to speak up about this war. Now we don’t even count the bodies. We only count the American bodies. Woo-hoo. That’s even more self-obsessed. We kill hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis, and we don’t pay any attention to how many there are. We don’t call up the hospitals; we don’t call up the morgues. Let’s count the Iraqi bodies over again. Maybe we can bring them over to this country. Prop them up at some of Bush’s speeches, so we know what the money is going for. Americans want their money’s worth.

    “It’s so interesting that Canada doesn’t have anywhere near our percentage of murders. Why is that? Maybe it’s because we were the ones who had slaves and killed the Indians. After the civil war, we let men go and some went west. Martine Prechtal has said that many of these men had untreated trauma just as many Vietnam veterans had. Imagine what that was like after the civil war. Unbelievable, the brutality of that. We sent them right out West, where they became the Indian fighters. We have the stupidity typical of a country that doesn’t realize what the killing of war can do to a human being. We just send them out. That’s called the repetition compulsion. We have to look for more Indians and kill them. If we didn’t learn anything from the first killing of the Indians, every ten or twelve years we have to do it again. Bush, of course, that coward, was never in the war at all; he sneaked out. It’s not as if you have to be in a war to want the repetition. Now repetition is built into the American culture.

    “The invasion of Iraq is the biggest mistake this country has ever made. The most dangerous and greatest confrontation is between twentieth-century capitalist fundamentalism and eleventh-century Muslim fundamentalism. I’ve translated much Islamic poetry and I admire the Islamic culture. We have no idea how great their poetry is, but you’re also looking at a social culture frozen by the mullahs, frozen in the eleventh century. That’s the worst thing we could possibly do, to get into an antagonistic relationship, and that is exactly what Bush did. Bush Sr. was intelligent enough to pull back and not go on towards Baghdad. There’s nothing we can win in this war. Our new war is a war against the terrorists, but Bush Jr. has created ten thousand new terrorists.

    “Bush and Wolfowitz and Cheney are repetition compulsion people. It’s wrong to give into them. We have veered off our own path completely. We’re pouring billions into Iraq, and Oregon has just taken nineteen days off the school calendar.

    “Lincoln and Douglas had debates. They’d go on for four hours in the afternoon, then they’d take a break and come back for two hours more in the night. You could say that people in the audience were watching them speak to see if their words fit their bodies. Is this the real person? But on television no one is real. They’re all being someone else. The entire American nation has lost that ability to decide if those words are genuine. That’s why Bush won the election. He never would have gotten near winning an election in the nineteenth century. They would have seen immediately that his words and his body don’t fit.”

  • Robert Bly’s Greatest Hits

    Selected Poems, 1986
    A “best of” anthology of a kind, these are really good poems—and the mixture of work sheds light on Bly’s stylistic and topical meanderings. You’ll find “Counting Small Boned Bodies” and other lamentations on Vietnam, as well as more than a hundred examples from three decades of work. The prose poems from This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977) are beautiful and show off Bly’s command of the unwieldy form.

    Sleepers Joining Hands, 1973
    To understand how Bly got to be so Blyish, look back to some of his earlier work. His third poetry collection is filled with vigorous incantations on the good, the bad, and the ugly, and it is punctuated with a long discourse on the Great Mother. The essay makes a good primer for Iron John and The Sibling Society.

    The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, 2001
    This is Bly’s most recent collection. If you’ve joined the current Rumi rediscovery trip, you’ll have a better appreciation of why Bly seems to be jumping all over the place—that’s part of the beauty of this old Islamic form (ghazal). He’s trying to get your head to stretch some great distances, to make those “psychic leaps.” Even without knowing anything about the Battle of Ypres, you can easily appreciate Bly’s incredible energy, insight, and wit.

    A Little Book on the Human Shadow, 1988
    This is a highly readable collection of essays that offers up “the philosophy of Robert Bly” in less than one hundred pages. He explains his connection to Jung and gets into the feminine, masculine, and then some.

    The Sibling Society, 1996
    It’s an artful diatribe on our moral decay and the dominance of American popular culture. But unlike other polemics of this ilk, Bly digs deep and blames our own selfishness for squandering the knowledge of how to live in community. The result: permanent adolescence. Be prepared to look in the mirror.

    Iron John, 1990
    Read it and you’ll be able to start an argument at nearly any party. If you want to understand it, though, you may want to take a few classes in psychology, mythology, classics, sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, and men’s studies. It’s heavy stuff, and it’s very easy to get lost in the forest. Bly is extremely blunt and often his take on male-female relations can sound harsh toward women. No good pickup lines here. We’re supposed to embrace our differences before we can enjoy our sameness. For some that’s not so easy to swallow.

  • Flip Your Wig!

    You can do it!

    Here are the answers:

    Magers—the King; Robinson—the Count; Santaniello—the Helmet; Binkley—Bozo the Piece; Grayson—Best in Show; Diana Pierce—Ferret-Glo; Murphy—the Wet Mop; Gatenby—the Rust Bucket

  • Bubbleheads!

    Bobbleheads have recently become all the rage among collectors of sports souvenirs. Those oversized craniums, wobbling on springs as if Parkinson’s disease were desirable in a doll, are a pleasant diversion when perched on your mantel or flanking your computer monitor.

    They’re funny not just because of their striking ugliness, but because they point beyond themselves to some disturbing home truths—at least the football bobbleheads do. In real life, the craniums of 300-pound linemen are incredibly vulnerable, despite appearances. Blows to the head, no matter how thick the skull or its natural padding, can lead to serious brain injuries, most commonly concussions. They are the type of injuries that can cut short careers. Thus the most recent attempts to improve the safety of football players have focused on helmet technology—specifically, efforts to make the headgear lighter, stronger, and cooler.

    “It’s a question of simple physics,” said Vikings tight end Hunter Goodwin. “A lot of concussions are caused by a whipping effect of the head and neck, and with less weight to propel, there’s less whipping.”

    Goodwin is one of a handful of Vikings wearing the most modern version of protective lids. After a four-year study of both head-on and lateral collisions, Riddell Sports introduced the Revolution.

    The most noticeable difference is its size—if you thought Jim Kleinsasser, Bryant McKinnie, or Chris Claiborne appeared a bit bubbleheaded this year, you’re right. The Revolution’s shell is bigger than standard models, to accommodate extra padding. It’s also got six oval-shaped holes across the crown to provide better ventilation, and it wraps around the mandible to protect the jaw.

    Goodwin said that after years of little change in helmet technology, Bike—a competitor of Riddell—came out with a space-age prototype that he tested in 2000, when he played with the Miami Dolphins. “I was the players’ association rep in Miami, and in a players’ union meeting the safety issues were discussed,” he said. “We saw the results of the tests between the Bike and the old Riddell helmet, and that made it a conscious decision for me.”

    Riddell introduced the Revolution at Super Bowl XXXVI, where Rams fullback James Hodgins was the first player to wear it in a game. Riddell made the Revolution available to the rest of the NFL in time for the 2002 season. Other companies are working on similar models. Schutt Sports unveiled a new brain-bucket at the Army-Navy football game a couple weeks ago. Schutt claims its helmets borrow from technology used in the Army, meaning we’ve come full circle since John T. Riddell allowed the U.S. government to borrow his patented suspension helmet design in 1939 to protect Allied troops in combat.

    The suspension model—an unpadded plastic shell literally suspended above the player’s head by crisscrossing straps—was still the helmet of choice in 1975, when equipment manager Dennis Ryan joined the Vikings staff. In fact, Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton was one of the last to change to a padded helmet, and Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page never did make the switch.

    “When Page went to Chicago, I think we had to send his helmet there, which they painted blue,” Ryan said. “He also wore an aluminum face mask. They bent a lot, and what was scary is, they would collapse. There were a couple of times where you wondered if you were going to get the helmet off the player’s head, they would be smashed in so far.”

    So even though the old helmets were good enough to protect the bean of a future supreme court justice, one would have to be pretty thick to deny that today’s models are a decisive upgrade. But it’s still too early to tell if the Revolution has helped reduce concussions league-wide. “It’s tough to say one helmet is better than another,” Ryan said.

    Of course, the lack of data—scientific or anecdotal—is both a blessing and a curse. How can you tell which blows should have caused a concussion, but didn’t, thanks to the new helmet? “I haven’t noticed anything, but I guess that’s a good thing,” said Revolution-wearing Vikings tackle Mike Rosenthal. “It must be working.”—Patrick Donnelly

  • Sweet and French

    Who now reads Charles Morgan? Some years ago there was a revival of his novel The Gunroom, which proved to anyone who was interested that the middle one of Churchill’s three Traditions of the Royal Navy (Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash) was a living reality for young officers of the Edwardian Era.

    Morgan’s masterpiece is The Fountain, a thoughtful love story set during the First World War. The unkind complain that the characters talk more about doing less than any others in literature (even those of E.M. Forster, his older contemporary), but what could be more absorbing than serious reflection on serious sentiment, especially if it is presented in dignified English prose rather than modish modern psychobabble?

    It was not only inner lives Charles Morgan could delineate; he was expert at placing people in a landscape. The Voyage begins in 1883 among the green chalk combes of western France, north of Bordeaux just inland from the Atlantic, the land bisected by the river Charente, the land where Cognac comes from. In the last years of the nineteenth century, the vineyards of Europe were being laid waste by a tiny insect from the East Coast of the United States called Phylloxera vastatrix; the name means literally Dryleaf the Devastator, which sounds like something out of Tolkien. In its own land it lives by sucking sap from the hard roots of the American vine Vitis labrusca so when it came to France and found the soft rootstock of Vitis vinifera the European grapevine, it behaved like a mouse munching through a wheel of Brie. It took years to perfect the science of grafting French vines onto hard American root stock; it was during this hiatus in brandy production that Scotch whiskey really established itself as a popular alternative in the smoking rooms of London clubs. In the meantime Charles Morgan’s hero Barbet was having anxious discussions with the parish priest about the spread into neighboring vales of the vine pest, “the accursed green fly.”

    This is a novel full of food and drink. In the first scene, Barbet, an amiable man as unworldly as he is wise, takes a big pot of homemade stew to the six prisoners in the local jail, which he runs in his old farm buildings. Charente is a part of the world where eating and drinking are taken seriously. Even today, in a France where young folk are supposed to be knee-deep in McDonald’s wrappers, one may read in a Jarnac school newsletter that the children are to benefit from a program of éveil sensoriel (sensual awakening—it sounds better in French) based on discovering the pleasures of eating local produce. Lucky old them, I say.

    No doubt as part of their awakening they will meet (in suitably moderate quantities) the sweet local wine Pineau des Charentes. This appealing pudding wine is made in both white and rosé, though the white is much more easily found than the pink. It is of varying ages, from twelve months to twelve years—the older the better. And it owes its sweetness not to the grape varieties from which it is made (claret grapes for the pink, a whole range of varieties for the white) but to the local brandy used to arrest its fermentation as soon as the grapes have been pressed. One part spirit to three parts grape juice prevents the grape sugars from turning into alcohol.

    Pineau des Charentes was allegedly discovered when someone in the 16th century poured brandy into a barrel of freshly pressed grape juice. The legend seems set a little early for the development of brandewijn by the Dutch in the seventeenth century—though this was indeed one of the areas where canny Dutch merchants of the Rembrandt era got their grapes. Whether or not either legend is true, white Pineau des Charentes goes well with creamy things, custard, or Brie. And the rosé is that rare thing, a wine that goes well with chocolate. Lightly chilled, this is one of life’s simple pleasures. As innocent and as amiable, perhaps, as Charles Morgan’s Barbet.

  • Keep Your Friends Close, Your Enemies Closer

    A few months ago, Intercontinental Video reopened its doors. It had been closed for more than a year, after a fire destroyed the West Bank store’s irreplaceable video collection of almost 50,000 titles. The store was always a sure bet if you were trying to up your cool factor with an attractive potential mate by finding some obscure title. Om Arora, owner and operator, had been gathering foreign films for twenty years. He is originally from India.

    It might have been a good time to get out of the business, what with the rise of DVDs and DirecTV. But Arora decided to resurrect the shop, after scores of loyal customers and desperate singles encouraged him to. Starting over made it easy to convert the business; Arora now deals primarily in digital discs. This is not the first time he’s had to convert from one format to another. Shortly after he launched the first time, a new format called VHS was beginning to take a bite out of Beta.

    Arora started the business as a hobby while he was finishing his Ph.D. in genetics at the U of M. When I stopped in to check out the new digs, he took the broad view. “It’s a fresh start, after twenty years. Now it is like a takeoff for me. When an airplane takes off, it is slow of speed and then it gets fast. Whether that speed will come for the store again, I do not know.”

    Intercontinental’s seedy old Cedar Avenue charm has been replaced by a white-and-green sheen, spotless décor, and the tidy economy of DVD boxes on thin shelves. Still, the shop holds the same old wealth of dubious offerings. Here’s a copy of the depressive subtitled foreign flick Stroszek. There’s the kitschy cult classic Vampyros Lesbos.

    Around the corner, on Riverside Avenue, is World Beat and Video. The friendly competitors are just out of view of one another. Together, the two stores encompass the largest and most diverse video collection in the state. World Beat also has plenty to crow about in the way of recent improvements. The store’s owners, Solomon Cherne and Erdoan Akgue, have enlarged the DVD stock, including Bollywood titles and the African films that appeal to the neighborhood’s burgeoning Somali population. They have also installed a café on the store’s ground level.

    Solomon Cherne is originally from Ethiopia. Erdoan Akgue came from Turkey. The two met when they attended junior high together in Minneapolis. For the past twelve years, they have gotten along remarkably well, working together in the store every day. They occasionally disagree on the merits of particular inventory, however. “This guy can get excited about a movie like My Dinner With Andre!” said Akgue with disgust. “Not for me. I need movies with more action.”

    Arora, Cherne, and Akgue seem to agree that there is enough business for both stores to thrive. But it’s probably not something to chalk up to the cosmopolitanism of Twin Citizens. Any owner of an eclectic, independent video store holds this maxim dear: When the going gets tough, the tough fall back on steady porn rentals.—Jeremy O’Kasick

  • My Shizzle: Gone Fazizzle?

    If you’ve watched television at any point during the past ninety days, you’ve probably seen the latest ads from Old Navy, a brand that dispenses irony like VH1 serves up nostalgia: cheap, shameless, and unfiltered. In a commercial I cannot for the life of me get out of my head, a waxy Fran Drescher brays, “My shizzle’s gone fazizzle.” She enunciates these words in a way that suggests she’d like very much to be told what the hell “shizzle” and “fazizzle” mean. Needless to say, she’s not the only one.

    Lil’ Kim is featured in another Old Navy ad that offers a race-reversed variation. In it, L’il Kim wears the sort of outfit a prep-school girl might pack for a trip to Killington with Muffy and Biff.

    Outside the world of inexpensive clothing manufactured by impoverished Asian children, Jerry Stiller stars in an advertisement for the latest Satanic incarnation of America Online. Stiller appears unannounced in the home of a middle-class couple who, like the rest of humanity, feel only contempt and hatred for the AOL discs sent to them on an hourly basis. They’re so turned off by AOL, in fact, that they’ve constructed an elaborate fish sculpture out of the discs. This is upsetting to AOL pitchman Stiller. He suggests that they complete their sculpture with a Snoop Dogg CD. This prompts the arrival of a visibly enraged Mr. Dogg, who admonishes the couple to “wait just one minizzle.”

    These campaigns at once highlight and satirize the state of race relations in the U.S. They’re funny, one supposes, precisely because they offer such improbable juxtapositions: Fran Drescher and black slang, Lil’ Kim and tweedy ski wear, and Snoop Dogg mixing it up with George Costanza’s dad. These ads are part of a wave of humor based on the lazy melding of black culture with white idiocy. In Bringing Down the House, one of the year’s most popular films, a far-too-enthusiastic Steve Martin adopts a ghetto-fabulous wardrobe and spouts horribly dated Ebonics in an attempt to help real-life raptor and costar Queen Latifah. In Malibu’s Most Wanted, Jamie Kennedy plays a Wafrican-American (White African-American) who doesn’t let his privileged background or white skin get in the way of behaving like a particularly sorry would-be member of Master P’s No Limit army. On HBO’s hilarious Da Ali G Show, a white Brit named Sacha Baron Cohen adopts the comic persona of a clueless Indian who desperately wants to be taken seriously as a B-boy.
    There are countless other characters whose humor is predicated on the contrast between their white skin and their black behavior. The feebleminded “wigger” is by now a stock comic character, the walking embodiment of the culture-clash school of comedy.

    From an entertainment point of view, it’s easy to see why the wigger is a popular character. It’s an easy gag, one so embedded into our nation’s background that it’s almost a part of our mythology. Why did the chicken cross the road? We still ask that question not because it’s a hilarious joke, but because it’s part of American folklore. Similarly, a movie need only introduce a white character kicking it street-style to win an unearned laugh of recognition.

    “Wigger” became vogue shorthand to label white kids who behave in ways considered black. The word gives a good indication of the low esteem in which these characters are held. People who wouldn’t be caught dead using the word “nigger” seem to have no such hang-up about using the word “wigger,” even though it’s nothing more than a contraction of “white nigger.” (Some have argued that blacks themselves coined the word not only as a contraction, but to label someone who had “wigged out” about his or her racial identity. This punning is itself an example of how wonderful authentic black street talk can be.)

    White comics who act black usually emulate a particularly debased, broad caricature of black behavior. This sort of comedian is a descendent of the minstrel performer of yore, the clown who earned his daily bread reassuring racist whites that all the negative stereotypes about blacks were true.
    The main difference between the minstrel-show performer and the Wafrican-American comic of today is that the latter’s buffoonish behavior is supposed to reflect negatively on whites rather than blacks. He functions as a supposedly self-deprecating white person, the message being “Don’t white folks look ridiculous when we try to emulate cool, black culture?”

    But just how incongruous is the Wafrican-American? Black popular culture is increasingly becoming American pop culture, to the point where the two are pretty much one and the same. In practice, plenty of white kids grow up listening exclusively to rap and R&B. Doesn’t it make sense that they’d pick up the affectations of their black heroes? After all, kids are nothing if not impressionable. As the U.S. becomes an increasingly multiracial place, the Wafrican-American caricature continues to suggest the regressive idea that black is black and white is white and never the twain shall meet. (Kids, of course, are smarter than that.)

    This is particularly ironic considering that the most controversial, influential, and admired pop star in the world is Eminem, a white rapper whose unironic embrace of black culture is widely and correctly attributed to his natural affinity and deep reverence for it, rather than self-hatred or the delusion that he’s a black man stuck in a white man’s body.

    The Wafrican-American stock character isn’t likely to die out any time soon. But there are small signs that artists are increasingly recognizing the complicated and ambiguous state of race relations. One of the many subtle touches in Barbershop, for example, was a white character whose mimicry of black culture is depicted as a natural admiration and respect for black culture, rather than a pathetic attempt to be something he’s not. Eminem’s character in his autobiographical movie 8 Mile was depicted this way too.

    Unfortunately, characters like that are still exceptional. But artists in the future would be wise to acknowledge that the boundaries between black and white culture are increasingly fluid and ambiguous—a fact of life refuted by the very existence of the comic Wafrican-American.

  • The Year of the Onion

    The Chinese calendar declares that 2004 is the year of the monkey. Anyone born this year will be intelligent, well-liked by everyone, and have success in any field they choose. Lucky monkeys. The loquacious and red-faced Democrats have claimed 2004 as the Year of Change. Athletes and festival purists may see 2004 as the year the Olympics return to Athens. In addition, most of us have our own personal brands for the year, as in 2004: The Year I Run Three Miles Every Damn Day, or 2004: The Year of the Sex Change. But those have more to do with resolutions than an actual annual manifesto. Thus far, nobody has seemed to get it right, so I’m calling it. This 2004 will be a year of complexity and strong reactions, many will peel away the layers of their lives to find their true essence, we’ll see widespread acceptance and global success, and there just might be some tears in the process. For all intents and purposes, this will be the Year of the Onion.

    Such a mundane veg for a potentially fantastic year, you say? Maybe you don’t know how emblematic the onion really is. Rotund and ready to roll, the onion has character, not giving in so easily under the knife. It bites back. Once tamed, though, the onion gladly softens, sweetens, and plays backup to other foods, rarely hogging the limelight in most dishes. Sautéed with a bit of garlic, you have the smell of home-cooked memories hanging about. Like any great work of art, onions have been both maligned and exalted by kings, and misunderstood and appreciated by the masses. And they have stood the test of time to land smack-dab on your hot dog in this great year of 2004.

    It is actually believed that we’re coming up on more than five thousand years of love for the onion. Most anthropologists agree that the onion probably grew in its wild form throughout the region from Israel to India, where primitive man presumably first pulled them from the earth. The earliest civilizations knew the value of the onion. Egyptians saw in its multilayered skins a symbol of the universe, peeling back the layers of eternity to find the two stems of life’s beginning. The onion appears in art among the feasts of the gods and was a true companion in the tombs of Pharaohs. In 1160 BC, King Ramses IV was mummified with onions in his eye sockets.

    Maybe with the return of the Olympics to Greece we’ll see a return to the old practice of competing athletes devouring pounds of onions, drinking onion juice, and rubbing onions all over their bodies in preparation for competition. Maybe not. High-society Romans were the first to brand the onion as peasant food, going as far as passing laws on certain times of day when it was okay to eat onions. Apicius, the first gourmand, does little for the onion, whereas the foot soldiers of the Roman Army wouldn’t go marauding without them.

    Easily cultivated in many climates and soil conditions, the onion spread throughout the world. The genus Allium is extensive and includes garlic, shallots, onions, leeks, chives, scallions, and lilies. Since cultivation began, there have been several different sizes and types bred, which has led to much confusion. If all green onions are also scallions, are all scallions green onions? Onions are best lumped into two categories: the round globe onions with single bulbs and the tubular cluster onions. The latter never form bulbs; instead they grow a cluster of stem bases with long green leaves and are referred to as spring onions, oriental onions, green onions and sometimes scallions. But the term “scallions” can also mean young leeks and sometimes the tops of young shallots. These onions are the oldest and most used ingredient in Chinese cooking and the only onion commonly used in Japanese cuisine.

    Papery, spherical, and robust, the globe onions are usually bought mature with the dry delicate skin hiding the pungent flesh. The fresher the onion, the milder the flavor, so an older onion with very dark papery skin will have more kick. The basic grocery store set includes Bermuda onions in white or yellow, the usually yellow Spanish onion, and the red Italian onion. And then there are the juicy, sweet debutantes of the onion world that show up every once in a while to steal the show, the Vidalia (which can, its Georgian creators claim, be eaten like an apple) and the wondrous Walla Walla from Washington. These are great starters for those afraid of the onion’s bite. And how does one tame an onion so that no cook shall be reduced to tears? Simply chill the onion for 20 minutes before cutting to slow down those sulphuric compounds, or if you don’t have the time, a welding mask also works.

    The very Zen onion often finds its way into sauces and dishes as merely a flavoring agent, propping up the other ingredients with no thought for self glory. But it is this quality that makes it indispensable. The chicken-fried rice at Kinhdo is the best in the free world, in part because of the healthy proliferation of onions. And then there are times when the onion can unexpectedly take center stage, like when you grab a Polish sausage at the Bulldog and heap it with sauerkraut and onions, just to be close to the gods. Then, of course, one of the best ways to enjoy the delightful nuances of the onion is to find a hearty bowl of French onion soup, slathered with melted cheese and crusty croutons. The Panera chain makes a good bowl, but I’d like to suggest a real special sleeper: Keegan’s Irish Pub in Nordeast serves an onion-rich broth topped with a half-inch of the finest Irish cheddar. Yum! My challenge to you this Year of the Onion is twofold, just like the twin hearts of a Texas Sweet 1015: Seek out the best French onion soup in the city and seek in your inner onion.

  • From Norway >> UFOs in the Fjords

    After threading his car through a few harrowing switchbacks on a Norwegian mountainside, Erling Strand stopped the car and pointed. “It started down in the valley and someone saw it moving up the hill there. The lights are yellow, many white, some are blue, very few green, also different types of colors. It’s been so bright that part of the valley is illuminated at night.”

    Erling was describing an unexplained light spectacle in this land of the northern lights. “It’s not the aurora borealis,” he cautioned preemptively. “The lights are down in the valley and there are no houses there. Even the Norwegian air force has seen something and can’t explain it. When a plane comes, the lights go away, but often come back afterwards.

    “I try to avoid the term ‘UFO,’ because most people immediately think of it as nonsense and then no scientists want a part of this,” said Erling, who during the day is a lecturer in computer science at Østfold College. “We try to use the term ‘Hessdalen Phenomenon,’ after the name of the valley.” Just so, Erling has helped the café in town fabricate a “UFO Senter.” It exhibits numerous photos of the mysterious lights, video footage of UFOs, and paintings of bug-eyed aliens.

    As Erling drove on up the mountain to an observation point, his cell phone rang. One hand worried the steering wheel of his Suzuki jeep while the other held a Nokia to his ear. His face turned grave from the news. He closed the phone like a clamshell and said, “That was the police. There’s a missing person in the area. So I have to stop and talk with them, because we have many observers scattered around this area.”

    After checking in at a ranger station on the top of the mountain, Erling returned to the car. Oddly, he saw no relationship between the potentially abducted person and the mysterious lights. “The missing man is mentally unstable, so they’ll use a plane first to see if they can see him in the valley.” This reminded him: “Many of the police have seen the lights too.”

    Erling summarized the situation. “I’ve been working on Project Hessdalen for more than twenty years, and the phenomenon has slowly diminished. There’s no good theory to explain it; no solution can really cover all of the things that happen here. Some think it’s because this is one of the areas of Norway with lots of sulphur and copper. But Røros has copper too, and there are no lights up there.” After two decades of careful research, Erling obviously has his theories, but he remains inscrutable. He seems to want me to make my own conclusions.

    “People weren’t aware of the lights before. But if you know they exist, you start seeing them too and realize that your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. Sometimes we’re not sure if we actually see the flashes, though. That is when we check our machines.” Just then, Erling turned off the road, put the Suzuki into four-wheel drive, and revved up a field to a little automatic monitoring station.

    He opened a closet-sized metal building whose roof blossomed with antennas, satellite dishes, and cameras. Inside, gadgets and monitors filled the walls. “We control all this through the Internet,” Erling said proudly. “Whenever anything happens, the cameras will photograph it.” Erling showed me a stack of photos of the phenomenon taken by a spectral camera. (They looked like headlights at dusk.) He boasted in rather an American way that his video has even appeared on the
    Discovery Channel.

    Next stop was a hytta, a small mountain cabin filled with students ranging from twenty to forty years old. They were in Hessdalen to study the lights. A flying-saucer jungle gym stood outside, and “Alien var her” (Aliens were here) was spray-painted on the wall. Inside, a map of Stjernehimmeln (the starry sky) was tacked above a coffee table loaded with Geiger counters and various electro-magnetic sensors.

    Some students were still sacked out in sleeping bags on the floor after spending the night on a “UFO Safari” in the hills. They used their rucksacks for pillows, while others boiled “Yum-Yum” brand ramen noodles. “There was this rising light and many people got very excited,” one of the students said. “We all started taking photos, but it was just the moon rising with the clouds in front of it.”

    “Later on, though,” added another student, “we saw small blinks and a light pole slowly rise up the hill. That was real.”

    “The biggest observation was when we stood up quickly and got lots of little stars going on—about fifty or sixty of them,” said an impish man with a perfect Southern twang, acquired from a wayward year in Alabama. The others laughed but weren’t fazed by his skepticism. “It’s very exciting to sit there and to take measurements. We took photos of sparkling lights down in the valley…”

    “…and then we stopped drinking the moonshine,” the southern Norwegian added.

    In the car ride back over the mountain, Erling said, “It’s too early to say what causes this light phenomenon. I could make all sorts of silly theories, but we’ll wait till we get better info. Some people in Hessdalen claim they haven’t seen the lights”—here, he scoffed in rather an American way—“they just don’t want to be connected with it.”

    I asked Erling if he’d ever seen any unexplained phenomena during the day. “Yes.” Just lights? He hesitated and chose his words carefully. “No, I’ve seen metallic-like objects and something that was cigar-shaped.” Then, taking the measure of his interviewer, he quickly added, “I choose to focus on the lights, though, because it has been a proven phenomenon.
    —Eric Dregni

    Eric Dregni

  • In Defense of Stuart

    I am a female reader who really likes Stuart Greene’s column, and not as kindling for a fire. I hope I am part of a legion of such readers who have written to say “rock on.” I presented your debut column to my (male) team teacher as a potential piece to use in our college-level gender unit. He was thrilled to find this opinion in print, as our unit lacked any unpretentious, intelligent counterpoints to the status quo. As an added bonus, I think it saved his sanity—or at least encouraged his suffering conscience, which is down for the count after twenty years of marriage to a woman who seems, as you point out in the December 2003 column, to go “Def-Con Five” when he wants to talk about sex. Not for these reasons alone do I like your column. I know there are at least a few married women who can discuss sex as a sensuous plumbing issue without the emotional high jinks. They are my friends, and they certainly give me an earful. But many don’t, I surmise, because women’s insecurities about monogamy are so perfectly socialized that merely a discussion of sex without “all the other things that go into a relationship” is too threatening. “If my husband works up a froth about shaving me in the shower, what next? Pretty soon he’ll be taking appointments—and not with me!” It seems the Buddhists have it precisely right when they point out that it is our grasping and rejecting that makes us so unhappy. A lot of women grasp at the idea of monogamy as if it were the only available relational life raft. Though my choice to be unmarried and childless perhaps makes me atypical among women my age (mid-thirties), I have been like the women you described. Happily, circumstances have conspired to show me what a hypocrite I have been, when, in the past, I emotionally hijacked conversations with lovers and boyfriends. I was behaving as if emotional withdrawal was the only card I could play to keep the horny man from straying. But as you point out in your debut article, it ain’t quite like that. Not all men in relationships want to act on their imaginative nonmonogamous impulses. But many women are guilty, I think, of subverting our own desires. Maybe we think this will save us from abandonment. On the contrary, I have been liberated by expressing my own desires. Emotional withdrawal is not the only action open to me, but figuring that out wasn’t easy. Women, I think, are afraid to talk about sex because it threatens their security. Furthermore, even if they weren’t so threatened, if other women are like the way I was, I could barely choke up the words to say what I wanted. Ladies: practice! Get a journal. Rustle up some words that work for you. Start writing about what you want. See what happens.

    Name withheld by request

    ***

    In response to Jenna Sophia Hanson’s letter [December] ripping Stuart Greene’s column “Should Married Men Go to Strip Clubs?” [Sex & the Married Man, September], here is another take: The human body is a thing of beauty. That we grow up in a culture that shames that nakedness is the real problem. The fact is, the human body is an object of beauty that has been celebrated by the likes of Michelangelo with his statue of David to the Romans’ Venus Esquilina. The key word is “object.” Our Puritan culture dictates that erotica and nudity are sinful because humankind will fall prey to lust. Sexuality beyond the bedroom of marriage is a sin, yet the most vocal tend to fall prey to the very vice they against. The men who frequent strip clubs only go there because nudity has been so reviled that the very act of taking off your clothes has been routinely relegated to “the seedy side of town.” You don’t see men decrying the “exploitation” of male dancers who strut their goods to the crowds of dollar-fisted women on Ladies Night. Some marriages, both healthy and otherwise, can handle a spouse’s visit to a strip club. Others can’t. Some people have addictive personalities. Others don’t. Visiting a strip club doesn’t disrespect one’s partner any more than satisfying an urge for chocolate disrespects broccoli. Disrespect in a marriage starts and ends at home. Erotic desire is natural. What is sexually arousing to one may be a turnoff to another. The next time you look at a man (or woman) and have an erotic desire, Ms. Hanson, keep in mind that you don’t need to be in a strip club to “callously objectify” that person.
    Peter Christensen
    Minneapolis