Not that I am looking for an excuse for not writing anything within the last few weeks, but I might just as well point a finger at something. It was the moving that kept me away from writing, or even thinking about writing. I don’t know how often you read this blog, but for all those who lost track, this has been my third move this year. So I hope you understand.

At this point it’s not only difficult to keep track of personal belongings, but I have to pause for a moment every single time when asked for my address. If I happen to recall the street, then I’m not sure whether the building is 3 and the flat 19, or is it the other way around. Not that important after all, although it adds dreamlike experience to everyday life. And it’s not just the address and belongings, also the surroundings become elusive. Every street and lane is familiar and strange at the same time. I’d be turning left instead of going straight, just to notice that the turn would have made sense three cities ago, but makes absolutely no sense here and now. A couple of weeks ago I set off to work on my bicycle just to cycle right by own front door quarter of an hour later with a mouth wide open. I’m sure I had made a ridiculously beautiful circle and confused the snoops, but I also discovered a space wormhole in my neighborhood and was late for work.

Absentminded? Maybe. But I have to admit it’s been great fun too. With the exception of yet again displacing what seemed like an endless stream of boxes and all that other stuff. Every move makes me scratch my head thinking if I need any of these items at all. By far most creative response to all this moving came from a friend of mine who asked if I only carry two backpacks with me after all these too frequent relocations. His remark was spot-on, as Britons like to say, and if I were smart enough, I’d shake it all off and stop carrying and caring. Of course, this wasn’t the first occasion leaving appendages behind crossed my mind. These kind of thoughts keep my cranium surprisingly busy every time I need to carry excessive amounts of things from place A to third floor place B. More than once I wanted to forget this or that box–as long as it didn’t contain any books.

Speaking of books, I could blame them for my long absence too. It’s so much easier to curl up in bed with a good book than it is to sit by computer trying to come up with something anyone would want to read. Especially when other writers have so much more captivating things to say.

Whenever moving I am always amazed how many books I rediscover, which makes for even scarcer and weaker attempts to write. Obviously I buy more than I can read, or even remember what all I would have wanted to read. Of course, when bought, most books are optimistically placed onto the pile next to the bed. At some point the pile grows too large and every so often I move the books to the shelves where they are all to easily overlooked and forgotten. But whenever I’ve been packing and unpacking boxes I unavoidably rediscover all these gems. First I have a hard time placing the books straight into the boxes as I’d so much more like to sit right there and then and read the book, any book (I believe you’d want to do anything else but pack too). And the same struggle recurs during the unpacking. It’s terrific and terrifying at the same time.

Even though you might think I’m kooky, I must admit that I love doing this. It’s like shopping for [place your favorite item here]. I find it very much resembles browsing in a great bookstore. Great majority of these books I have carefully selected and am sure that at least at some point I had a very good reason for getting every single one. This shopping-like instant gratification is particularly reinforced if I have completely forgotten about owning a certain volume. So when I hold it in my hands the desire to know what the covers hold immediately comes back.

And that’s what happens when I am at home; it’s nothing in comparison to how ape I go when in a good bookstore. Unless you’re a book nut, I encourage you not to come along. It doesn’t really take a Powell’s in Portland to tickle my book nerve for hours (size doesn’t matter, variety does); Akateeminen bookstore in Helsinki does the job just as well. And just as women usually park their male counterparts in a sports bar before they head out shopping, I park my missus in the shopping district and head out to a good bookstore. It would work perfectly, if only shopping wouldn’t exhaust her so quickly.

And what could be a better place than Finland for a book lover. I was stupefied when I read in Nick Hornby’s fantastic column that “forty percent of Britons and 43 percent of Americans never read any books at all, of any kind.” As if it wasn’t difficult enough to imagine that half of the population of these two countries never read a single book, the reading there seems to be in decline. So it’s not a slightest surprise I spilled hot tea all over myself when I read that Marcel Proust recently made a comeback by making the top ten list of the best selling foreign authors in Finland. And these sales figures were not just coinciding with Proust’s blockbuster hitting the big screens in Finland; Proust was among the best selling foreign authors for three consecutive months, even reaching the sixth place in the April 2007.

As I trust you knew already, the reason behind Proust’s success was not really Brad Pitt giving voice to the famous French writer, which could result in a massive hysteria and teenage girls rushing to bookstores grabbing Proust’s books off the shelves. Rather it was the Finnish translation of Proust’s seventh and final volume of À la recherche du temps perdu that caused the spike in sales. And it is probably safe to assume that whoever bought the seventh book has most likely already read the preceding six. Which only makes me wonder how many of the respondents in the research Hornby quotes knew that Proust is actually a writer and not a dessert or a salad dressing.

I’m heading to the Helsinki book fair this weekend. Let’s see if I can come home without any books this year. And you should stop wasting your time reading this blog; go tackle a book instead. (Tackling books was, by the way, exactly what bookmarks distributed in my US high-school were telling the students they should do. The bookmarks even portrayed a fully equipped football player (wearing helmet and all) holding a book like Hamlet usually holds a skull. I’d say you should read them, tackling’s no good on a book.)

Mladen

The sweet revenge of the bitter Grandmas United Against Pedal Pushers Club in Munkkivuori, Helsinki. I wonder what caused the installation of this fabulously hilarious and absolutely nonsensical speed bump for bicycles. Were residents of this quiet area riding their bikes too fast? Too reckless? I really wonder just what the hell was going on here that someone actually took the trouble of bolting the bump onto the concrete path tiles. And it’s not that it would require incredible effort to ride around the bump, it’s the sign that scares the bejesus out of me: “No thoroughfare.” I’d much more expect to spot something like this in one of the German speaking countries, not Finland.

I regretted so much that I was on foot, as otherwise I would gladly engage in an act of civil disobedience and ride right through. Boohoo.

Mladen

For all I know I am in the right place as far as reading is concerned. Recently I’ve been plodding through all kinds of statistics for you, so what follows is the juicy stuff, or at least I believe there’s something really interesting in these numbers which are quite telling and just as appropriate for the point I am trying to make here.

If you’ve ever been to Finland and stopped by any store or kiosk to pick up your favorite magazine, you’ve probably noticed that there was an incredible amount of papers and magazines in Finnish you had to shuffle through before you could maybe find something in English, or maybe in Swedish. Well, that at least was my experience and as a result I got brave enough to pick up a Finnish language version of National Geographic, even though I’d been around only for a week at that time and was completely new to the language. Nevertheless, I was, and still am astounded at how many different magazines, papers and other periodicals there are in the stands only in Finnish.

This might sound like a silly observation to you, but my experience from, for instance, Slovenia is that there are many more foreign language periodicals than Slovene language ones. Although this might have changed in the last two years a bit, I seriously doubt the balance would have shifted the other way. Just for the illustration, in Finland more than 300 different periodicals on various topics of culture, science or based around other intellectual viewpoints are published regularly. This number does not include tons of new-age magazines for women, men, children, teenagers, car or gun nuts, which are published in Finnish too. And they still say that the market can take more.

Let’s dig deeper into the numbers.

The three most read Finnish daily newspapers have in the year 2006 on average published 676.735 copies every day of the week, of which Helsingin Sanomat alone had a daily average circulation of 426.117 copies (the other two being Aamulehti with 138.258 and Turun Sanomat 112.360). In other words Helsingin Sanomat has the highest circulation among all the newspapers published in the Nordic countries. And I should mention that none of these three largest Finnish papers are tabloids, or are based on yellow journalism. Just for the record, the two most read tabloids are Ilta-Sanomat with 186.462 and Iltalehti with 133.007 copies published six days a week. That’s a lot of newspapers, almost a million copies daily (996.204, to be precise), and we’re talking only five newspapers here.

It’s difficult to imagine where all these numbers stand, so let’s put them into perspective a little bit. The largest British non-tabloid is The Daily Telegraph which published daily 901.238 copies in November 2006, while the news authority in the US, The New York Times, is printed in 1.120.420 copies on weekdays.

I’m no statistical guru and really have no idea how circulation, population and readership comparisons are made, but here’s a little experiment I’ve come up with. Before you begin ranting, yes, I do know about those three types of lies, nevertheless, I think this is fun, so please bear with me.

I took the number of people living in each of the three countries where the above mentioned newspapers are published and have divided that number by the circulation of each newspaper. And I have to say that the results absolutely stunned me. Here they are: The New York Times publishes one copy per 270 people (302.495.015 / 1.120.420), The Daily Telegraph one per 67 people (60.209.500 / 901.238), while Helsingin Sanomat publishes one newspaper per 12 people (5.310.000 / 426.117). Now I think that is quite telling and even though I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, it’s still difficult to wrap my mind around it.

If there are some of you out there smirking at my playing with numbers, here’s another calculation for you. Even if I take for instance USA Today with supposed circulation of 2.25 million and divide copies among the inhabitants of the US, 134 people would still need to line up for one copy of the paper each day, which I think you would agree wouldn’t make it a very practical daily paper. Similarly goes for the British The Sun, which is supposedly one of the papers with the highest circulation in the world and has been as of June 2007 published in whopping 3 million copies a day, but for which in Britain 20 people would end up queueing each day. And The Sun really is only ambulance, celebrity and scandal chasing tabloid, all of which are characteristics to disqualify it outright from our otherwise serious reading.

And this is not all. All these newspapers, but Helsingin Sanomat, are published in English language which is by some estimates spoken by roughly 1 billion people today. While if I estimate the potential readership of Helsingin Sanomat at around 6 million, I would probably be grossly exaggerating. So this even further brings the population to circulation ratio of this Finnish newspaper at odds.

Which brings me to my final point. Even if I disregard all the circulation statistics and my little number experiment above, there is the everyday reality by which I am surrounded. Finns of all ages are very passionate about reading. This might be just my subjective feeling, but I cannot not mention that I have never anywhere before seen so many people reading so enthusiastically practically everywhere.

After all, what is most telling and important of all is how well people are informed. One of the most common questions I am asked is where I come from. So a couple of years ago when I came to Finland, I was startled every time when as I was about to begin explaining which city in Slovenia I came from, people would ask before I could tell: “Now, do you come from Ljubljana or from Maribor?”, citing the two largest cities in Slovenia. Which is, sad to say, but nevertheless a stark difference from my experience in the US from the mid-1990s where after telling people that I came from Slovenia, very common replies would be “Well you must have traveled a long time from Siberia” or “So how is life in Somalia these days.” Not to mention that I often had to explain that yes, we do have electricity and cars too, and that I know what a microwave oven is.

Mladen

Two cool things happened yesterday. I’ve finally seen Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera, a movie I’ve wanted to see for a long time now. Actually it was Lev Manovich’s great book The Language of New Media that brought my attention to it a few years ago. Manovich writes extensively about Vertov’s movie drawing parallels between the common characteristics of the movie and the today’s new media. Now that I have actually seen it, I can finally understand what is so hip about it.

If I didn’t know when it was made, I’m pretty sure I would have guessed wrong. Sure, it’s done in black-and-white and it’s without sound (the music accompanying it in contemporary version was done just recently according to Vetrov’s vision), both of which give it vintage look and feel. However, everything else about it is contemporary. Everything from (then) experimental editing, to length of cuts, dynamics, even topics it covers (technology).

This just a bit over an hour long film praises technology of it’s day. In 1929 that mostly meant machines and Vertov shows many in a truly poetic way. The film immediately reminded me of Godfrey Reggio’s quatsi trilogy, especially the first two films Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi. While the other story it tells is the story about a cameraman. Camera following camera, an issue which resurfaced in the last decade when there has been a lot of talk about remediation (Remediation: Understanding New Media by Bolter and Grusin is just one such example). So again, the movie is right on the spot.

While Vertov was fun, the other cool thing of the day was more educational. It was a lecture about lockpicking titled nothing else but “Locks, Lockpicking, Security” held by Mateusz Pozar at Valand School of Fine Arts. There’s really a lot about this topic out there on the Net, but it is so much more fun to hear someone talk about it in person.

Pozar covered pretty much everything from the historical development of locks to the very basic mechanical underpinnings of different kinds of locks. It was interesting to hear that locks have not changed much over the last two centuries, which I found to be rather surprising given all the other technological advances and how much we rely on locking up our stuff on every step. However, Pozar actually spared his audience from actually showing how to manipulate and pick locks, which I had expected to see with anticipation.

But what was really cool about the lecture were the tidbits. For instance, that already Egyptians were using wooden locks, which were opened with really large keys. That the guards at the Tower of London have been for the last 700 hundred years locking its doors every single day at exactly 7 minutes before ten o’clock in the evening encapsuled in just as old ceremony that looks more like a sketch today. And among other things also that the city of Detroit gave the keys to the city to no other than Saddam Hussein himself. I don’t know if I am really surprised by that.

Anyways, the lecture was more about the social aspects than the actual act as our speaker was still perfecting the skill. But for all you budding enthusiasts out there, here’s where you can start:
- The Open Organisation of Lockpickers
- Sportenthusiasts of Lockpicking Germany
- Lock Picking 101

Knowledge is power. Have fun.

Mladen

Whether you live in a Western society or not, you probably couldn’t have escaped the term information society, or even better, the knowledge society. Of course not, those are buzzwords. If you want your country too look good both nationally or internationally politicians and businessmen will be talking about their populations living in an information and/or even knowledge society today. With what they just want to say how advanced they are. Being one of the model countries in many ways, I’m sure Swedish politicians and businessmen are doing the same around the world. Maybe they should, but their society is very much still a paper-based I-don’t-know-how-to-help-you knowledge and information society.

Buzzwords aside. Whatever they want to call it, I say it’s first and foremost an overly paper-counter-clerk trio bureaucratic society. From educational institutions to Internet providing services and libraries, public transportation and banks (not to mention the state itself), you cannot do anything, absolutely anything useful without your arm being twisted. It is a country where the Swedish personal number and not the king, as many like to believe, rules.

A personal number? Yes, it’s a several digit number by which you are recognized wherever you go; it is your personal trace and I think pretty much every adult knows what I am talking about. So what, you get that once and from then on your life is a breeze. Yeah right, as if it was easy to get the Swedish one. The taxation office that is in charge of giving out these personal numbers, has a selective eye, as it turns out.

But it took a week of meandering from door to door before I have even reached the local taxation office. Everyone on the way (some of them I’ve mentioned above) knew only that they need a personal number from me, none where does one fetch one. Until I stumbled upon the wise one.

After a week of trying to sort out things that need to be sorted out when moving to a new country, I came across an official (I don’t remember where exactly it happened as I’ve seen a few too many) who actually even knew where I can get this elusive number. To keep a long story short the visit to the tax office looked like this: I provide them all the information about myself they need before assigning the number, return to the counter where stiff official looks at me carefully, walks away, comes back, and finally utters that they will give me the number once I find a job. But I’m here to study and need the number for who knows how many things? Find a job first! There you go. Maybe I should just make one up.

That’s only the regular life part of the Swedish information/knowledge society. The other one is school related. And I don’t know anymore which one is more, both hilarious and obnoxious at the same time. At Valand School of Fine Arts where I have been accepted to study, I have been repeatedly met with blank stares and who-are-you questions. In spite of the fact that Valand is a small school with only about 60 students, the most frequent reply to my “But, your school has accepted me into one of the programs”, is “I haven’t heard anything about you before.” And that’s after talking to the administrative personnel of the school where I have been accepted and after I have presented a letter of acceptance they have issued just a few weeks ago. Not enough?

No, the administrator also wants to see the proof that I am a student at the university from which I am coming. Luckily I have that too, I think to myself. She leaves the room to take copies of both documents. Upon her return I feel triumphal as things are finally moving somewhere, yet my joy is met with “I can’t register you.” Why? What else do you need? My Swedish personal number? You name it, I’ll produce it. All I get in reply is: “There’s nothing you can do. I don’t know you and I didn’t expect you.” As if I wouldn’t have already noticed myself that I cannot do anything. I briskly leave the office after I am handed a university reference number on a heart-shaped red Post-it note. Am I in a Buñuel movie?

Have I mentioned bureaucratic obstacles somewhere already, or is this just an elaborate practical joke?

Before I register with the Göteborg University I cannot use any of the supposedly many university services, from student health care and other benefits students in Sweden are entitled to, all the way to their libraries, Internet connections and information systems. While without the Swedish personal number, the Swedish taxation office refuses to give me, I can’t do anything else. My hands are tied.

It feels weird. Sure Göteborg University has excellent premises, a variety of courses, at 5,500 they sure employ a lot of people, all of which is nice, but it is definitely a pain in the ass to even get a schedule for your courses. I should start counting how often I’ve been told to visit Mrs. Nextdoor, tomorrow, of course.

Coming from a much more efficient system put up by the Finnish society, I’m slowly beginning to loose my patience here. Have you seen the super-cheesy movie The Terminal? Well, I feel exactly like Mr. Viktor Navorski felt like when his light-green form has been rejected for the n-th time. In my case it hopefully won’t take nine months to sort things out before I can begin a living a bureaucracy free life in Sweden. Or am I asking for utopia?

Mladen