I watched a pleasant little 45 minute drama last night about a single parent trying to juggle two children, a job as a social worker and studying for a degree who finds the first stirrings of affection, of love, in her first attempt, or so we must surmise, at a relationship in a while. The drama was not very taxing and hit the usual notes for such drama; largely inconsequential. However I was struck by the performance of the Norwegian actress/actor (the former seems to have fallen out of favour in Hollywood in recent times, presumably in a post feminist zeal, which is fine by me but it can cause confusion in the printed word when you cannot hear or see the actor speak). I did not recognise her and so I did a little googling and came upon 'christwire.org'. (Incidentally, I am very much of the opinion that John Fogarty should re-record, complete with interminable guitar solos, Keep on chooglin' as Keep on Googlin'.*)
The article I read was an op ed piece about the Norwegian TV series, Lillehammer, which is about an American who opens a club in Lillehammer and which stars the actress/actor in question, Marian Saastad Ottesen; it purports to be a comedy/drama, although the one episode of it that I have seem did not make me laugh a great deal; but then I seldom find 'Being Human', a series about a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost flat-sharing very amusing either and it trades under the same banner, although it is nonetheless an enjoyable view.
The article was, when you got over the first few paragraphs, quite obviously a spoof of US neo-con, fundamentalist Christian ideas; the geography of Norway was all wrong, and Sweden too; Lillehammer was spelt Lillyhammer; the characters were all described as drunken, licentious reprobates. However, this got me thinking that parody treads a fine line between spoofing the real subject of your parody, in this case ignorant neo-cons, and actually insulting the object of your attentions, in this case the Norwegians.
It is difficult to know with any certainty how many comments on the piece, many of names sounded genuinely Scandinavian, took it seriously and how many were simply entering into the 'spirit' of the article but is is surely stretching it to suppose that people might not actually find it offensive; Norwegian, whether Bokmål (almost-Danish) or Nynorsk, are the Norwegians' native languages, however good they might be at speaking English and they are very good; just listen to Morten Harket (A-Ha) giving interviews on English speaking radio of television,** and you run a very real risk of the parody being completely missed.
All humour relies to a greater or lesser extent on hyperbole and exaggeration to make its point; even Jeff Durham's 'vent' puppet, 'Abdul the Dead Terrorist', which pokes fun at Jihadists (and that can cause serious trouble, just ask Salman Rushdie or the twelve Danish cartoonists), falls short of genuinely insulting even Islamic terrorists, by (a) making Abdul a somewhat inept terrorist and (b) by making him dead! The very problem that 'christwire.org' has is that it is attempting to parody, exaggerate, something which is already so totally and completely 'off the wall' that it surely defies parody; how can you parody something that is so far outside the normal bounds of any sane, rational human being as to be its very own parody. You do not need to invent the humour, it is there in plain sight for all to see! Of course some people are born blind or come to blindness late in life and there will always be people in the world who do not grasp quite what they are saying and then wishing us to believe in it.
Besides, Norwegians ARE a rum lot! (Only kidding, Sonja!) Rampaging lunatics and death metal bands who think that 'Battle of the Bands' gives you 'carte blanche' to murder the rival band's guitatist is surely the result of not enough sunlight, the snow and a fondness for herring, although not as bad on the fish front as the Swedes who have taken herring to unheard of culinary heights with 'surströmming', which comes in cans and which it is recommended be only opened and eaten outdoors, so noxious is the smell of the still fermenting, and rotten, fish; a delight only rivalled in my experience by Japan's 'kusaya' which is similar and carries the same health warning. They are both eaten through a gas mask. They are, however, quite nice in small amounts; you just have to have your nose surgically removed the day before; a gas mask will only mitigate the stench not remove it completely.
The truth of the matter is that we Brits have never come to terms with all that pillaging, looting, raping and general mayhem occassioned by marauding bands of longship sailors from Scandinavia, keen to foist their hard-won catch of herring on us for nigh on three centuries. And, please, don't get me started on Knut and his ill-advised attempt to prolong his sunbathing by preventing, or trying to prevent, the tide coming in, which, as every Brit knows, is the only time we can retreat to the pub for a few jars and leave the missus and the mewling brats outside playing with the bouncy castle and being sick!
I leave you with a short piece written by the Penguin but never published; it is quite short which leads me to believe that is not finished but nevertheless I think it sums up the Penguin's take on flying rather well. It was probably written not long after the post in 2008 which asked the question, as Thomas Nagel and Timothy Sprigge had asked; 'What is it, to be a bat?'
Oh, what it is to be a bat!
Oh, how we envy you. We
birds, penguins, rheas, kiwis, birds that cannot fly. Birds that cannot swirl upon the updraughts; rise among the thermals over the African plain; birds that can only fly
in the waves! To think that a mammal could fly; by it's own power, by
its own design. To be a mammal and not human; and to fly? What would
that be?
While we penguins lament our inability to fly,
except through the more viscous medium of water, we envy bats more than
birds; even though the birds' heritage is the same as ours. Orcas or
porpoises traverse the same medium as do penguins but to behold the bat,
without feathers, that supreme pre-adaptation to flight, soar amongst
the tree tops, 'Uber allen Gipfeln'***, that must be surely wondrous! To fly on mere
elongated fingers, without feathers embedded in bone; on the flimsiest
of osteal structures. How much more can that feel? How much more must that feel?
To
feel each fingertip flexing, as it must, with each down stroke, with
each recovery. The tautness of the membrane as it sweeps and glides, the feel of the air on your hairless and featherless skin.
And
then to 'see' through sound, as a dolphin does. To 'see' the echoes of a
dragonfly, a cockchafer, the tiny, gossamer wings of a lace fly. Would
not this be truly wondrous? But whence came this? This ability to sound? To
paint pictures with the return of a simple wave, a movement through air,, a reflection, an echo. Does Zeus still dally while the bat hunts? Is the
picture, which forms in the bat's mind, coloured? Does a bat 'see' red, blue, purple and gold as echo while still perceiving the reflected light? Are the echoes as subtle as colour and hue? Fancy? Perhaps, but a bat, and a dolphin too, can
differentiate between shapes, densities, the very fabric of being. It
can tell the difference between a perch, a twig, the trunk of a tree and
an airborne beetle. But whence comes this precious gift?
The one thing that bats cannot do is to differentiate between monofilament fishing line and the empty air. MG tells of nights spent fishing with only the moonlight for comfort and how the bats, flying low across the water, would constantly collide with the taut line held tight by the leger weight. It apparently, or so he tells, took him three of four nights before he finally discovered what was causing all those false 'positives' on his 'bite alarm'. Only once did a bat actually collide with the tip of the fishing rod itself; less of an errror of judgement in its flying, far more likely that it thought the 'top ring' of the rod a beetle on a twig and tried to grab it.
* No, I have no idea what chooglin' means except that is likely a verb! Answers on a postcard to:
ThePenguin@suitablywasted.co.uk
** It has always amazed me how the Scandinavians often lose the 'sing-song' quality (if you lose the music in Norwegian, you're buggered) to their speech when speaking English; the Muppet Swedish chef is not typical. It is the weirdest thing to listen to a bi-lingual speaker switch from one to the other, often in the same sentence. This does not seem to be true of Welsh, another sing-song language, and the Welsh largely grow up, except in certain well defined areas, speaking English as their native language.There is music to be found in the Welsh speaking English.
*** 'Wandrer's Nachtlied' (Usually translated as: 'Wayfarer's Evening Song', although I prefer 'lullaby') The title of a famous poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a writer without compare which has as its opening line: 'Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh', 'Over all the mountaintops there is calm'****. Franz Liszt wrote the most soothing and beautiful 'Lied' imaginable to accompany it; Schubert had a stab at it too but it is nowhere near as good in my opinion.
**** There are almost as many different translations of this poem as there are translators and mine is notable for but one fact; 'ein Gipfel' means 'a mountain top, peak or summit whatever other translators may say in their whimsy
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