I worked briefly at the National Archives as an apprentice bookbinder yonder, and I remember the genealogists that came trundling up the path from the metro every day, carrying heavy bags of notes. They would request church registres, dusty tomes, old newspapers and microfilm from the six floors below ground. A systematic, gargantuan, taxonomic task. I always thought I would never bother with it, because: back then you needed serious discipline and a keen sense of priority. You would only have a few sources of information available at one time, and flitting to and fro by fancy was not a good idea. Enter scene: the internet!

I started out with the names of my great grandmother, for the simple reason that they are unusual, and therefore easy to follow. The first name, Schjoldager, goes to Trondheim, and I find a small street there named after my great-great-great-grandfather or so. I thought that was rather swell, actually. He was a chimney- and chimney sweeper-inspector. Trondheim burned several times, so I guess this was a reasonably important job. At least not one they would give to the town drunk. Then Schjoldager morphs into Wolner/Wølner, and goes to about 1590, to Jacob Wølner who came to Norway from Freiberg, Germany to work as Overstiger at Kongsberg Silver Mines. Schjoldager stops there – or at least, I have not tried to find the rest of the Wølmers of Freiberg.

So, back to great grand-mamas second name, Figenschou. It goes to northern Norway, then to Bergen. There, a fellow by the name Elias Fiigenschow (b. ab. 1599, in Copenhagen), was apparently one of the best portrait painters in the country. His grandfather, Mathias Fugenshuh (1540) was a royal saddlemaker from Hindelang, Germany, and he had a coat of arms. I was chuffed. Hurrah, I thought. A proper, swirly family crest complete with animals, acantus and shields.

Elias married a Bloch, and to make a long story short, she hails from the old Norwegian noble families. Apart from having hilarious names such as Benkestokk, Smør (Butter), Smørhatt (Butterhat), Krukow, Bratt til Tomb, Ku til Tomb, Stangjarfylja, the crowning beauty is a governor on Iceland, Tore Bjørnsson Tinghatt (Tinghatt = thing (as in assembly) & hat). The source considers that the name Þinghottr may be because he “came to a thing (assembly) wearing a peculiar hat“. This strikes me as wild speculation, but hey – I love the thought, so I am sticking with the story:

Some time in the early 1200, one of my ancestors came to the assembly meeting wearing something amusing on his head. 

From another path of the Figenschou line, I find the unassuming name Hage. The line goes to Danefær, to not-so-unassuming Holstein, to von Reventlow, to Rantzau, Buchwald, Breide, and further to the positively pompous von Ahlefeldt, Limbek, Gyllenstierne, von Rugen. This may not say very much, but they are all nobility, knights, members of Council of the Realm. Wherever that may be. I was at this point swimming in more crests and coat of arms than I cared to, and it was clearly steering towards Scandinavian royalty. And if you get mixed into that, there is no way out. To cut a very very long story very short, I end up at various kings and queens of Sweden, Denmark; princesses from England, Poland, Italy and Russia. Some saints too. This is around year 1000, and if things are a little shady after the black death, it certainly gets foggy around 1000.

Of course, genealogy is not an exact science, and I am no professional. I am good at digging around on the internet though. Of course I may have gotten something wrong, but I would be in good company, among those hobby genealogists that came to the National Archives. I have tried to find at least two sources and confirmation of the lines, particularly the high royalty. They often had multiple wives, husbands, children out of wedlock left right and centre. The men might die early in war, the women in childbirth. I am learning much about “NN”, and the politics of marrying off your daughters for political reasons. And after all, we are all related, more or less. At least in Scandinavia it was not uncommon to send a child to a neighbouring lord or a relative to be brought up there. This was to ensure connections and peace, but it might also leave the origin of the child uncertain. At some point in history, the idea of “parent” may be biological, or may be whoever raised the child. See the confusion?

From Figenschou, I find three distinct lines that I have not followed through. One point to the old kings of Norway, and the two others both point to Charlemagne. I mean, what do you do then? Behind him is the Byzantine empire.

Once you have hitched your family tree to a royal line, there is little point in following it through: others have done that. The royal connections are amusing, but I do not feel any relation to them. My initial interest was to find amusing anecdotes such as the guy with the peculiar headgear, and the guy that “in a fit of anger did away with himself with a rope” (Johan Reinertsen Wormhuus, 1686, Bergen).

I have three more family lines to look at. They will not be so easy, but they might have good stories. And yes, I made a family tree. A work in progress.

“If you’re looking for a daily dose of anything, boblet’s wonderful blog isn’t for you.  This woman gives warning at the very top of her homepage: “If I have nothing to say, I won’t say it.”  And sometimes she doesn’t say anything, for weeks at a time.  But I check regularly to see if there might be something new, because the new invariably is quirky, fun, dense with meaning, and absolutely guaranteed to keep me thinking, until the next post.  She has written my single favorite blog entry of the last year, and when I get around to writing my response to her post, you’ll know which one it is.  In the meantime, where else can you find the adventures of Zapf Dingbats?”

Ah, Linda, the adventures of Zapf Dingbats and Comic Sans have been widely distributed – among the probably narrow bunch of font-freaks…

But she is right, I don’t write for the sake of hits, I write for… well. Myself, some people I wish read my stuff (maybe they do), and the few that I know do. This blog is a little like firing pottery: the end result will last for longer than I care to think about, and to publish should not be a race (nothing should be a race, come to think of it). There is no winning on the net. I like to think of the award as an award for silence. The rubbish I have not posted hopefully places the few things I have written in a better light.

Linda herself writes some of the best stuff I have come across; she writes beautiful prose, intelligently on anything you care to think of, and then some. Part of the award is to nominate another five blogs of outstanding quality, and I can only say it is a shame it would be bad form to give the award back to her. The world if full of so much rubbish, it is balm to find coherence, intelligence, sense and acute observation.

And that brings me over to the reason why it has taken me so long to publish this piece. I am not really a blogger, I am not a blog-reader, so to find five recipients was not such a simple task, yet one that deserved careful consideration. I have not been able to come up with five, so the magic number is three, and I shall count on being forgiven. Rather three excellent ones, than five not so. I shall maybe go a little outside the Arte Y Picos scope, but I will argue that writing is art, observation is true talent. To Linda, and to you three: thank you. Don’t stop.

Here you go – my three thinkers. In no particular order. I leave it to you to explore.

Drink design

Stonehead

Illusive joy

The art of looking sideways
Alan Fletcher
This is how it looks like inside my head. It a fountain of musings, facts, the odd, solid, and whimsical. It is design, doodles, unfinished thoughts, images, drawings. It is colours, shapes and wisdom. It is a delight and frustration at the same time – if I could show what goes on in my head, this is pretty much it..
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I should have stayed home
Roger Rapoport, Marguerita Castanera
Very funny. About all the glorious trips and travels that goes wrong. A collections of discomfort, disaster and disappointments. Timbuktu is not like you’d think. Not a homage to the well-planned, but rather an honest picture of how things can go, regardless of preparations.

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the IRA
Tim Pat Coogan
There’s a lot of junk about the IRA out there; a lot of rubbish. This is not without it’s faults and exhausting going-ons, but it is one of the better ones.
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All the trouble in the world – the lighter side of famine, pestilence, destruction and death
P.J O’Rourke
O’Rourke should not be read in one sitting – he can be exhausting and a little too much. But he IS funny, cynical and sometimes, dead on. All the trouble in the world is not always what it looks like, or what some would like us to believe.
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The great war for civilisation – the conquest of the middle east
Robert Fisk
Depressing, informative, exhausting and impressive. It is very good, and the good Mr. Fisk is a relentless journalist, not letting sleeping dogs lie.
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Thinking with type
Ellen Lupton
Despite this being part of the curriculum, it is very, very good! Hah! Imagine that – a first class book in an educational institution… what marvels…
It gives a good, sensible introduction to typography, without the annoying, sentimental waffle often found in such books.
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The elements of typographic style
Robert Bringhurst
Clearly for the especially interested – but the book on the subject. In-depth, clear and sharp.
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Neither here nor there
Bill Bryson
Mr. Bryson can be a little too much too, and sometimes rather predictable. But his travels around Europe is very funny, and combining his experiences with the ones he had as a youth doing the same trip, is hilarious. Personally, I am fond of the story about the german restaurant, the incomprehensible menu and the threat of calf brain.
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Three in norway by two of them
anon
Hysterically funny, and should maybe belong under fiction for the many tall tales and absolute nonsense. But the descriptions of norway and inhabitants are spot on..

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Out of Africa
Isak Dinesen /Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke
Never mind the film. The book is beautiful, intelligent. Her view on her time in Africa very interesting, and the stories she tells vivid and touching.
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Hidden agendas
John Pilger
Well. Good old Mr. Pilger seems to repeat himself endlessly, so one book will do. He is relentless in his digging for truth, and like a dog with a bone, will not let go. Bless him.
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Those are real bullets, aren’t they?
Peter Pringle, Phillip Jacobson
There is a large pile of books on Bloody Sunday, but this is the best to my knowledge. There is a limit to how interested I am in reading about bullet entry angles over and over, when we all know what went on. They got the new inquiry, and we are still waiting to hear it.
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We wish to Inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families
Philip Gourevitch
The awful story of the genocide in Rwanda.
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Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Brilliant thoughts on time.
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Color – travels through the paintbox
Victoria Finlay
This is the book with the annoying language and irritating fancies and guesswork. But the subject is immensely interesting, and her travels to all sorts of odd places entertaining. The myths and stories well researched; the fascinating conflicts and wars fought over colours fantastic.
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The ice master
Jennifer Niven
The mad story of the polar expedition of the ship Karluk and it’s crew. It is a story of survival, cruelty and a mad scientists’ need for self-promotion, but most of all it is a story of how tragedy can split men and bring out the worst in them. The crew and scientists of the expedition survives or dies along social divides, rather than work together. Revealing and terrifying.
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The politics of nationalism and ethnicity
James G. Kellas
Interesting. Don’t think I need to say more than that.

The poisonwood bible
Barbra Kingsolver
A stunning story about a bible-bashing missionary, his wife and four daughters, in the last days of Belgian Congo. Impressively, the five women have distinct voices and their common story unfolds in different facets through their different viewpoints. The family and the country disintegrates, and the girls all choose different lives based on those two years in Africa.

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To kill a mockingbird
Harper Lee
A classic, I am told. A beautiful story told with subtlety and simplicity. The two children of Atticus Finch, Jem and Scout, discover and learn what is important, and that majority does not mean right or fair. About race, racism, childhood, prejudice and secrets. Secrets kept by families, and by whole communities.

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Life of Pi
Yann Martel
Fairytale, metaphor.
Pi, is a 16 year old indian boy who have been a practicing christian, hindu and a muslim at the same time, to his secular parents’ great dismay. The family is moving to Canada, the freighter sinks, and Pi finds himself stuck in a lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, a female orang utan – and a royal Bengal Tiger.
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The last king of Scotland
Giles Foden
A brilliant view on Idi Amin through the eyes of a young scottish doctor. A comment on raving mad, lovable and manipulative dictators everywhere. The balance and the line between funny fruitcake, strong leader and rabid mass murderer is well described, and the rather gullible and naïve doctor realise it all a tad too late.
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Cat’s cradle
Kurt Vonnegut
See the cat? See the cradle?
Wild, funny and desperate social comment from the good Vonnegut. A sharp and glittering view on what motivates people, and what makes the world go ’round.
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Slaughterhouse five
Kurt Vonnegut
Based on Vonneguts own experiences from the bombing of Dresden, it’s wild, mad and utterly believable. Frightening yet funny.
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Out stealing horses – Ut å stjæle hester
Per Petterson
An amazing story that only gets better on second and third reading. Trond, an old man moves to a cabin, and meets a man that brings back memories of the last summer he spent with his dad in a similar place. It seems like a pleasant exercise, but a darkness lies behind everything.
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Midnight’s children
Salman Rushdie
I have read this a few times, and I still think it is Rushdies best. It is fantastic, imaginative; suffused with the weirdness of India, Indias independence and crazy magic, poverty and curry. It is written in a clear language, light-years from Rushdies later see-how-many-complicated-words-I-can-spell tendencies. Quiet, simple.

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Eureka street
Robert McLiam Wilson
“All stories are love stories.”
So begin the story of Jake and his friends, a mixed bunch of people in Belfast. It is wildly funny, shocking, and very very Belfast. Soft and hard, surprising and sweet.
Jakes fat, protestant friend comes up with a scheme to make money, and nothing is ever going to be the same.
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The trial / the process
Franz Kafka
Dark, disturbing and funny. The trial is an excellent story of a man accused without knowing what for, and the senseless labyrinth of mysterious, dark ways to secure support. The desperation of K as he traverses unknown parts of the city to seek knowledge and information, and how his mind changes focus in the process. He stops asking the obvious questions, and accepts.

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One hundred years of solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Tells the story of a family and their fictional town, Macondo, spanning a hundred years. An exercise in history, fiction and a smattering of magic realism, Marquez weaves histories, generations and actions of different times together in an intricate mesh.
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Crime and punishment
Fydor Dostoevsky
The classic story of Raskolnikov, the hatchet and the old lady pawnbroker. Teeming with impossible russian play on words, it is a hard read, but at times hilarious. Raskolnikov justifies his actions and the murder of the old lady, and paranoia takes over his every waking moment. Obsessing with his own justifications, he is also unable to stay clear of the detective Petrovich in charge of the case. Raskolnikovs inhuman philosophy crumbles, and he understand his humanity at last.

War and peace
Leo Tolstoj
Witty and informative, it is not as impossible as some will make you believe. Some rants on history and how and who makes history, but basically entertaining and interesting. And it does indeed describe war. And peace.
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A tale of two cities
Charles Dickens
Dramatic, funny and interesting, it is a story about London and Paris during the french revolution. The plot is tighter than other of his books, and I am thankful that there are less of the hysterical humour too. It is a dramatic story, a traditional storyline, and though it gets soppy in places, I still think it is a great book.
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Foucaults pendulum
Umberto Eco
This is a riot in history, traditions, myths and the ability to see connections everywhere – you see what you want to see. The story is about three friends that works for a small publishing house. After reading too many manuscripts about occult conspiracy theories, they decide they can do better, and set to invent their own conspiracy for fun. They call this game “The Plan”. It blows out of all proportions, and escalates, as others seems interested in it too…
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The shipping news
Annie Proulx
Brilliant story of a simple guy and his two daughters moving to Newfoundland, where his ancestors are from. Surprisingly much happens in this book, and the language is economical to the roughly hewn, matching the scenery it describes.
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The butcher boy
Patrick McCabe
Mad story of boy growing up in rural Ireland. A mother in the asylum, a classic alcoholic father, Francis talks to the virgin Mary, and murders his best friends’ mother. It is bordering on stream-of-consciousness which I greatly detest, but McCabe pulls it off, and the disturbed mind of Francis comes through.
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Kafka on the shore
Haruki Murakami
My first Murakami book, this is a rollercoaster of whims, talking cats, fish raining from the sky, and some Kafkaesque scenes in dark alleys. Bizarre, brilliant, absurd and funny, the book hardly have head or tail, and is a law unto itself. “Linear” is not a word in Murakamis vocabulary.
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My name is Red
Orhan Pamuk
On the surface a murder mystery set in Istanbul during the Ottoman rule of Sultan Murat III. The story is told by different narrators, including a coin, the corpse and the colour red. Evocative and surprising.
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The island of the day before
Umberto Eco
In 1643, an italian nobleman is shipwrecked, and finds himself washed up to a seemingly abandoned ship at anchor near an island. Not being able to swim, he is trapped. It turns out that the ship is a research vessel, it’s original occupants attempting to solve the problem of longitude, so crucial to mastering the seas. Our man is convinced that the ship is anchored exactly at the date line.
The book is wonderful, covering a lot of interesting stuff, such as the belief that things with relations have “sympathy” with each other, such as a sword and a wound. There are also a memorable logic in the way Father Caspar tries to explain religion with science: there are not enough water on earth or in the heavens for the flood. Where did God get the water from? Simple: our lord used the water from tomorrow.. and therefore, science, religion and power have the same goal: solve the longtitude problem, to be able to rule the sea. And fate.

So- without further ado:

I give you The Alchemist.

Oh god. What sensless babble, what inane nonsense. The story and the point of the whole painful exercise is that there is gold in your back yard, but you would never have seen it without a nonsensical and stupid adventure (alchemy). The language is for children at best, and you can open it at any page and find skin-irritants like «The boy thought. The boy thought about the stars – I wonder what they think.» – or somesuch terror. Godawful stuff – and would not have earned a place on my bookshelf of shame if not for the immense popularity. I am sorry – but when people list this book among favourites, I write them off as idiots. Period (Actually – I’m not sorry about that).
The language is disgusting, the plot childish and daft. A lot of people like it and say it’s inspirational, a word that makes me shudder. Believe me: it is crap. I have read a lot. It’s dumbing down.

Then, to the more laughable and serious

Atlas shrugged.
What self-centered idiocy! What blind narcissism, what racist, stupid, vapid and cloyingly vomity. I read the first hundred pages thinking it was sarcasm, irony, a weird sense of humour – not so.
The woman is dead, that is a comfort, so she cannot spew out more braindead half-baked social commentary and «philosophy». What an affront! She tries to present her «philosophy» through «drama» – it is neither, and both is godawful.
She’s got charming views on social systems, classes and government, but most of all she is basically an «elitist» with facist leanings. Tipping over, rather. So. Poo-poo!

Here’s the brilliant thing: she divides the world into do’ers and wiengers. Do’ers – that’s about one in 10 000 are the only ones worth anything, obviously. Without these do’ers and leaders, the rest falls back to the stone ages and society falls apart into caveman behaviour at record time. See? So every single person reading this book will identify with the leaders and do’ers. The brilliant result is that the woman has a following (!), a cult and a bunch of fans…. now there’s a liiittle contradiction. You see yourself as a leader, and then hang after the author. But her whole «theory» is based on opposite. Result: the loosers hanging after the author and going to «appreciation groups» (how weird is THAT!) proves by going that they belong to the authors cavemen.
Wonderful. The author was an idiot. That doesn’t justify that tail of fools…

The whole book is ..oh.. about 1200 pointless pages of bad, bad drama and exceptionally bad thinking. If you find it in a garage sale, buy it, burn it and make the world a tiny little bit better.

One day I will invite you all to a bookburning, methinks. And we can laugh and read the worst sections of favorite pet-hates before getting hotdogs and hot whiskeys all around. And make the world a little bit better.

..and another day – I might tell you about my loathing for Mr. Hemingway, Anna Karenina and some of the Brönte clan.

Bookshops without books. Somebody should get shot. Somebodies head should roll.

In a corner, behind the massive display of diddle figures, pink pencils, rubber balls, key rings, balloons, wrapping paper, glittering teddy bears, and multi-coloured markers… there’s a small shelf, with a few books. It’s about the size of mine; after I removed 10 boxes and moved here.

They’re seemingly randomly thrown up there, not even alphabetically arranged, and different books and authors stacked in front of others. But they aaaaall have front facing.. the very least, they could have placed them spine out. I stood looking at the shelf for a good seven minutes, trying to wrestle out the system of it. There’s none. Either it was never meant to be a system, or no one is bothered that customers mess around to figure out what is behind.

Or maybe they don’t know the alphabet. Even their limited shelf of audiobooks are not arranged alphabetically.

I wouldn’t be surprised.

And what sort of books is it? I shouldn’t have to say. The DO have a Johan Borgen, the first book of the trilogy (and only that), but that’s just because there’s been an anniversary. And there is a Hamsun there too. Shame I detest him. But you know- standard, awful airport crap, with the embossed names of authors covered in metallic foil. Add a bullethole/slashing knife/bits of skeletal joints… and titles containing words like “final”, “destiny”, “blood(bath)”, “death” and “midnight”. (in fact, all airports I have ever been to, with one exception, had better bookshops than this university college town.).

I asked for five titles, they had none. All of them solid literature, price-winning, booker nominated, current and translated. Oh, I’m lying. They had one of them, as audiobook. It costs a fortune, and it is not the same. It is not a book. The woman behind the counter had obviously never heard of any of them, and I had to repeat author and title several times. Bless her, she’s probably a certified expert on Diddle-pencils and fluffy keyrings.

I’m lying again. They DO have books. Under the title “gift books”. You know, the type full of glossy, gorgeous photos of sunsets, cars, planes, food and as little text as possible. These books often come in folio formats, and take up a good deal of the shelf. So no surprise. They’re beautiful things, usually, but breaks a bookbinders heart more than paperbacks ever could. Don’t say the word “fiber” as you open one of them.
Coffee table books. As if I have a “coffee table”, where I can casually leave out a bunch of exquisite poster-sized books on buddhism, antarctica and cooking with asparagus.

Beauty doesn’t help, if it’s brainfood you want.

And don’t tell me about cost efficiency, the customer-gets-what-the-customer-wants, or any cows dung about majority rules. It’s a f*x%#*! bookshop. It says so on the front.
I’m pissed off and offended. I miss the irish bookshops. The stairs and upstairs in Dublin, Byrnes and Kenny in Galway.

“Stationery’s” is at least a fair name. Or “toys”. Bookshops it ain’t. An offence. A lolly-coloured hell.

Torch them all.

They wouldn’t burn, though. With all that pink fluff, they’ll just melt.