Paparazzi Ethnography

A Land of Pools and Pipes




6/29: Last Day in Iceland.

Doors open when the weather is warm in Reykjavik.

Doors left open and slightly ajar. Maybe it means something.






Reykjàvians are loungers. That is all there is to it. When the weather is warm, they sit around on benches, listen to music or read the news tattlers over soda. Perhaps I am dramatic, and difficult to follow. But there are many sofas around town.



Sofas in art houses and coffee shops

Sofas in restaurants

6/28: Reykjavik is a little more edgy than Akureyri. The night spots.

We spent the evening with a few Greenlanders who blew into town. I was happy to hear from them and suggested we visit a local dance bar near my flat.

In the heart of Reykjavik, it is, on the average, a rather quiet part of town. But there is in the capital of Iceland, a very different approach to living it up, so to speak. Of course, sitting in a corner having a quiet conversation, things seemed to be moving toward a boil, as the 1AM deadline on a Tuesday evening came to the fore.

Reykjavik night-life

Boys and Girls

Adults

“Kicking in chairs and knocking down tables in a restaurant….”

Earlier in the day, when there was more sunlight, we booked a few tickets on the tourist travel bus around Iceland’s Golden Circle.

Luckily, ICASS participant, Angela Byrne, PhD and Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Mobility Fellow, Department of History at NUI Maynooth as well as the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto — the genius that she is — gave me a tour of Ireland’s 18th to 19th centuries’ science and antiquarian studies of the North while on the bus. Quite frankly, without her, I would have been bored to tears looking at all that grassland without some accompanying intellectual chatter.

Angela spoke volumes about Ireland’s intellectual history — the development and routing of a Catholic Monastic literati, the rise and final rousing of an Anglican Irish, the Grand Tour diaries and diaspora of Ireland’s Gentry into the Prussian, Central European and Russian Armies based upon a noble registry. W-o-w! I will need to re-write my own interest in the intellectual professionals with some of her own perspectives.

Discovery on the bus was not the only thing that occurred during the trip.

We found an image of the Arctic without any ice in Greenland or the Arctic. And that is bad news. I do not know what year the publishers are referring to, but we will file this image in our discussion of In-Flight Warming.

Yes, we visited a power plant on the way. The entirety of Iceland seems to be one big Thermo-Gaia Reactor, bringing to mind my Islands of Inland Empire. We will just table these two ideas. Let us move on.




We found what I call the Heideggerian handle. In a different posting, I refer to the work of Martin Heidegger, on the topic of the ontological which takes the essence of the human form.

I was going crazy over these two handles when a few ICASS stragglers caught up.

Heidegger’s Handles versus the Concrete

Nuccio Mazzullo and Hannah Strauss

Dr. Nuccio Mazzullo of Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography and Hannah Strauss of the Thule Institute spotted us right away.

I explained that Heidegger concerns himself with the use and imprint of the human hand on things– e.g., in The Origin of the Work of Art, and that years ago, I came across a wooden picket fence, hewn roughly so that it would be easy enough to get a splinter.

But there, in the very space where you might think to grasp the fence to open the gate, the wood was well polished, patina-like as if it had been touched by the human hand for 20 years. Such investment, without consciousness, without deliberation, without a sense of virtue or demand, but simply the habit of human life struck me in a peculiar way. It appeared to me as a sense of accomplishment, fragile and ordered.

The Human Touch

Space of Neglect

And here, Nuccio said something brilliant. Listening to me, he stated, “yes, you can say that this is where Human Action comes into Focus”. That was the exact phrase I was looking for. Thank you Nuccio!

6/27: Swimming at the Blue Lagoon.

Passing pipes along the way.

Reykjavik in one fell swoop. That is what it felt like at any rate.

We blew down from Akureyri, starting about midnight. David Koester and Victoria Petrasheva, with me riding shot gun and gabbing the entire time about all my doings. Only Victoria heard in my voice a lullaby and not our driver, David, who managed to stay awake the entire time.

We went down a list of academic books we had read recently and suggested names for key note plenary speakers of the next ICASS. I mentioned to him ideas I had developed with my bare hands– all kinds of sense making, much of which is posted on this site.

Arriving at Brynja’s place, between David’s driving and my speaking, we were spent.

Bryna Des Vals is an Icelandic Professor who studied Russian years ago during a field year in Moscow. She is a long time friend of Victoria, the latter from Petropavlosk, and was gracious to open her home to two additional guests last evening, David and myself. I awoke inside what can only be described as a charming cottage, with an opened door to the outside, hearing the wind kick up a backyard of domestic plants gone wild.

Through-the-Looking glass was an apt description of my desire to take a coffee on the balcony.