Femeia Romana

Well, it has been a long time since I wrote something in this blog, but I have been traveling and then ... the minutes just slipped through my fingers, and so did the days, the weeks...
Now I am back!
Some of you have been asking me what I have been reading these days. For the most part it has been a pretty poli-sci, history, political mythology kind of business. There is some fiction on my nightstand, but I will get back to that in a later post. Now I wanted to mention that even though these days I'm into history textbooks a lot, the reading is not always that boring! There are some surprises, for example this description of a Transylvanian Romanian woman, circa 1785: "Româncele sunt supuse, prietenoase, îndatoritoare, si foarte harnice. Femeia munceste la câmp, vede de copii si de casa, toarce si tese pentru nevoile casei si pentru vînzare, îsi întocmeste si-si curata ea însasi îmbracamintea, creste pasari, duce sau mâna pasarile la tirg la vânzare, toarce din furca in timp ce merge cu caruta sau merge pe jos". (Christophor Scipp)
A translation with some degree of accuracy would say that the typical Romanian woman is obedient, friendly, dutiful, and very dilligent. The woman works in the field, takes care of children and the home, spins and weaves for the household and for sale, she makes and cleans her own garments, raises fowl, carries them to the market for sale, and while she walks she spins her yarn". Talk about multi-tasking!

The black zig-zagged rocks typical of this landscape

Geysir, the father of all geisers

Hot springs area, the earth steams with heat

Yes, it is this blue! And very very hot, too!

The mighty waterfall, Gullfoss

More of Iceland

One view from Thorvaldur's apartment

Reykjavik from on top: colorful like a Lego game!

Imposing mountains

And the über-postcard-like view of the Icelandic capital

Iceland Pictures

One of the old and typical Scandinavian buildings in the center of Reykjavik

The Icelandic Opera house, with an interesting architectural solution ;-)

Hjallgrímkirkja, a recent but very imposing construction (ended in 1984 if I remember correctly), which dominates the skyline with its 75 meter tower

And a nice interior view of the above church

Nice Blues

The four of us, Matt, Ross, I, and Analia at the above-mentioned Busboys and Poets

One of the nicest additions to the U Street area, Busboys and Poets, bookstore-cum-café

What's left of Chinatown in DC

(just behind this arch there is a Starbucks Cafe...)

The nicest street in Philadelphia

Anca and Cornel in the hallway of their beautiful townhouse in Philly

And my favorite flowers, in the permanent collection at the Met

The sculpture gallery at the Met

Times Square as seen from the 20th floor of the Google building

On the promenade along the East River

A clear morning (well, almost morning), with the Chrysler building in the background

A little bit of New York

Ross, very concentrated

And this is the final (and delicious) result

Photos: The US trip

Here are some pictures from my latest travels: first would come Paris, but at that time I was not in the possession of a camera, so I must skip to the second stop, the US. I stayed with Rossnyev and Matt in Virginia and took a long weekend to visit New York City and Philadelphia. It was fantastic to see again good friends and old places...

Matt preparing his famous pumpkin ravioli.

Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture

I so much admire people who defy death through their courage and energy. One such person is certainly Harold Pinter, too ill to travel to Sweden to receive the Nobel prize for literature, but not too ill to speak eloquently on issues of direct concern to us all.

In case you have missed the lecture, here is the link to the text: http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html

The part I like best is when he volunteers to be a speech-writer for Bush. What an irony and what a delivery (he used to be an actor as well, and it shows!).

"I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.
'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it."

Feminism

One cannot live in Sweden without being drawn into serious discussions about feminist issues. As a dilligent student that I am, I started to document myself about these theories and found them relevant not only for women but for all the marginalized groups (and yes, I do agree with the post-modernist assumption that everything expresses a power relationship).

Listen to this: "if a group is kept out of something for long enough, it is overwhelmingly likely that activities of that sort will develop in a way unsuited to the excluded group." (Janet Radcliffe-Richards). Nothing can be truer than this, I think, and it does not refer only to the incompatibility between the current design of the work market with child-rearing; it is a great strategy to make the marginal group not only excluded, but un-necessary in the kind of positions that the dominant group reserved for itself.

And even a more radical position, I am not sure that I completely agree with it but it must be largely true: "virtually every quality that distinguishes men from women is affirmatively compensated in this society. Men's physiology defines most sports, their needs define auto and health insurance coverage, their socially-designed biographies define work place expectations and successful career patterns, their perspectives and concerns define quality in scholarship, their experiences and obsessions define merit, their objectification of life defines art, their military service defines citizenship, their presence defines family, their inability to get along with each other - their wars and rulerships - define history, their image defines god, and their genitals define sex." (Catherine MacKinnon).