The Heart of Saturday Night

After recreating the entire collected works of Leo Tolstoy in my last post, I’ve been tempted not to hit you guys again with another bout of loquacious blathering so soon, but I’m sort of bored and I have pictures from last night I gotta use up eventually.

Saturday night came sloping in late, like it was just putting in a reluctant appearance at a photo op. Everyone in the world was going to the International Gasque (formal dinner) at Stockholms Nation, except for me who a) forgot about it and b) didn’t have the money for the ticket. I spent most of the early evening deliberating on whether or not I wanted to show up to the afterparty, which I knew would cost about ten bucks, not including drinks, would involve the long trek into town and back, and would probably result in not picking up any women at all. I asked Tom Waits what he would do, and he said he would totally go. Then he told a crazy story about driving a girl home in reverse on the Pasadena highway or something.
Anyway, I pulled up anchor at about 8:30, ditching three IM conversations and an online Scrabble game, when Emma came running into my room, grabbed me by the ears, and dragged me across the hall to where Tjis, the Dutchman she’s fucking, was busy turning twenty-seven. I talked to three neurobiology students from Cameroon and met this great German couple who invited me to have a threesome with them. They were both sufficiently good looking that I admit I was tempted, till it occurred to me that their definition of “threesome” and mine may not be the same, since my definition is “the guy cooks some really great food in the other room while I have sex with his girlfriend.” They knew some pretty good jokes, though, and had a line on a good Chinese joint in town off of Stora Torget.
We drank and sang and at 10:00 we went out onto the balcony and screamed like imams calling the inebriated faithful to their prayers and libations. I parted ways with them around 11 or so when they headed out to a bar by the river and I, ever a slave to democracy, caught the bus to Stockholms. I was already four sheets to the wind by then, muttering “Tom Traubert’s Blues,” my suit rumpled, my hat barely on, but my flask was full and I felt vaguely optimistic.
I rather hate Stockholms Nation, and so does everybody else I know. It has a sort of snobby air of pretension and actually has two dance floors, which I find excessive.
The party there was fairly unremarkable. I spent some time talking and flirting with Caroline (the omnilingual German mentioned some time ago, and the blonde pictured here) who I’m having lunch with sometime this week. My bastardly trick of using Japanese words and saying they’re just English words she didn’t know seemed to work—it has yet to let me down.


Spent some time saying hello to various people, explaining my strip club idea at some length, and talking to Martin’s tall, long-shouting friend whose name I will never learn. Spent more time failing to pick up women and avoiding Sarah, who was probably succeeding to pick up men. Around 2:00 I was swimming through the dance floor, which was so swathed in smoke that you literally couldn’t see who you were bumping, let alone grinding. Somewhere in the middle of that sweating, stinking, undulating morass of hormonal humanity, smack in the center of the most crowded dance floor in Scandinavia, I came upon Loufer, sitting down comfortably in a chair and having a beer.


Next to him was the Canadian I saved last Friday, wearing a red velvet sport coat, which seemed about right.

And then I noticed Jim, the American I saved the Canadian from. He didn’t look happy to see me. He dragged out a fist about the size of a mortuary and set about trying to hit me with it. If you look in the picture of Loufer sitting down, you can see it.

I, however, being schooled and experienced in the processes of peace and conflict resolution, pointed out that since we were both wearing exactly the same hat, thereby expressing the essential universality of all humanity, to attack me would in fact be to attack himself, he relented. Also, there were really big bouncers around.
They threw us all out sometime after 2:30 and we boiled into the sloping cobblestone streets like human steam, the weakest of us melting away into the night. By then I’d met up with Aisling (inexplicably pronounced “Ashton”) who is Loufer’s friend and the Irish girl who fell in the river in a post about a month ago. She’s a big Beat generation fan, so we talk a lot of Kerouac and Beckett and Ezra Pound and so forth. She had a friend with her from Dublin named Claire who I fell in love with immediately.

We encountered a Scotsman on the hill past the cathedral, and tried to decipher his strange moon-language.

On the long cemetery road, where the drunken international students streamed like overdressed refugees fleeing a strange alien war, we stopped at the world’s slowest hot dog stand. The wind had picked up by then, making long speeches through the branches and the gravestones. It was the sort of broken Saturday night that nobody'd gotten around to fixing yet, and I couldn't remember why I'd decided to come out in the first place.


We were there over an hour. Many of us got desperate and began to scavenge. I saw a man in an Italian silk suit with a good tie and a matching handkerchief eat a chunk of leftover pizza he found in the street.

Martin turned up there, which I guess made as much sense as anything else. He’d been playing a gig at Norrlands, apparently wielding an instrument he’d never played before. I talked to him while the wily Canadian paired up with Claire and after another hour or so of walking, we made it back to Flogsta. Martin went home, as did the Canadian, which I thought put me in the clear. Right civil of him.
Loufer was having an after-afterparty in his room, which turned out to be less of a den of hedonism and debauchery than I was hoping. He’s got a lot of books, though, which I’m jealous of, and a hell of a good music collection. He had an ugly friend there who was smoking the only dope in all of Sweden and listening to a slow, Leonard Cohen-y rendition of “Fever.” I sat on the bed, trying to think of how to proposition Claire without tipping of Aisling, who I think likes me and has a good hat. The Scotsman burst in, his kilt billowing, and seized up some sort of metal instrument, which he began to pound with a stick.

Loufer, not to be outdone, produced a giant bongo drum and began to pound it horribly, shouting Bukowski and mystical Sufi poems, perhaps in an effort to exorcise this plainly evil Scottish spirit which had infested his room.

It was to no avail, though. I made a half-hearted pass at Claire, and she declined, so I got out of there, surfing a bit on the contact high, and standing ankle-deep in peanuts in the elevator. I guess someone spilled a five-kilo bag of them in there. On the way home I saw a bicycle on top of a phone booth, and took a picture so you guys would believe me.

Diagnosis: Literary elephantitis. Prognosis: Grim.

(Author’s note: I will try to be very clear in what follows in drawing distinctions between what I think, based on evidence and theory and observation, and what I believe, which is based on nothing at all.)

As I have lately been remarking to absolutely everyone, regardless of whether they will listen or not, I have grown sufficiently bored that I have decided to direct my energies towards attempting to write articles which I will then fail to have published in Marxist theory journals. Unfortunately, I find the failings of Marxism and the contemporary left in general to be so staggering that I have no idea where to begin. This of course led to the excellent question of why I still cling to Marx.
After all, you heard Fukuyama--isn’t Marxism dead? Hasn’t the failure or extreme compromise of every self-described socialist country proven that Marx’s ideas, however well-intentioned, are not practical or desirable in the real world? Doesn’t the inability to empirically verify the labor theory of value bring the entire theoretical edifice of Marxism crashing down anyway? Can Marxism be taken seriously, what with its political economy moribund at best, its proponents scattered, leaderless, and prone to bitter infighting, and its increasing irrelevance in electoral politics?
Well, what can I say. I like a challenge.
My affinity for Marx can be generally split into two categories: the intellectual and the personal. I will begin with the latter first, as is my habit.

Like virtually every other Marxist ever, I was initially driven to Marx as a reaction against capitalism. It occurred to me very early on in high school, when I was directed to take advanced classes and apply to “top schools,” which would “all pay off in the end” that “working till I die making someone else rich” wasn’t exactly my definition of “paying off.” From there it was a very short jump to a strong predilection for Marx’s “ruthless and sustained critique of everything existing” and a rather juvenile reading of the Manifesto and State and Revolution, largely to offend my bloated Cold Warrior history teacher, which had me identifying myself as a Marxist very early on.
What immediately struck me was that, regardless of whether you agree with their theories or not, Marx and Engels’ analysis of what exists cannot be discounted. Yes, the vast majority of people do only live so long as they find work, and work only so long as they increase someone else’s wealth. Yes, obviously capitalism must constantly expand, and yes it is clearly based on irreconcilable inconsistencies. As a poor kid whose parents would never be able to retire on their schoolteacher salaries, I was already intellectually predisposed for these sorts of ideas to strike a chord.
But more than that, I find the characters and history of Marxism to be personally fascinating. Nowhere else will you ever encounter so many men of such intellectual intensity, who set out to remake absolutely every system in the world through violent revolution and damn near succeed. There is an undeniable romantic character to their doomed movements, one which I still find myself nostalgic for, and which got me sufficiently emotionally involved so as to become intellectually interested. I am prone to explaining that it is perhaps a defect in my character that I find the idea of success both mildly alarming and terribly uninteresting—I am much more fascinated by failure, and I have what is probably a rather unhealthy fixation with futility. As you might have noticed.
Unlike Kautsky and Proudhon, (and most of the New Left) I do not view socialism as a primarily moral question. Certainly the system of global exploitation and misery is morally appalling and serves as the foundation for other atrocities of absolutely staggering scope. But I tend to view capitalism as an intellectual problem—I simply do not think capitalism can sustain itself. I find the anarchic system of production inefficient, as one of its most prominent contradictions is that since production is determined by what is profitable rather than what is useful, a surplus of overproduction always occurs, while at the same time, most of the people whose work creates the surplus starve to death. A system in which you can work your entire life and still die in poverty, in which millions of children go to bed hungry in the world’s wealthiest nation, and in which a cow in France makes $2 a day from agricultural subsidies for its owner but billions of people live on $1 or less simply is not an efficient, rational system. I agree with Keynes that “the political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty.” I would (and probably will) argue that contemporary neoliberal capitalism is a system which achieves none of these things.
More to the point, though, it is not a system which can continue indefinitely. I was just reading an article in The Economist this morning, as a matter of fact, which asked whether the planet has enough natural resources to sustain the demands of accelerating Third World growth. It mentioned briefly that the world’s total reserves of copper should last 107 years, and iron ore 151 years at the world’s current rate of consumption. Later the article mentioned that China’s rate of consumption had increased by about 150% in the last ten years, and that as soon as China gets to the downward slope of its industrialization and requires less raw materials, India will more than pick up the slack, so it can be concluded that the world’s rate of growth will increase dramatically from what it is today. The article did not, however, mention that this means that the world’s reserves of copper and iron will therefore run out much sooner than 100-150 years, nor did it mention that peak oil production is likely to be reached somewhere between the next 15-50 years, or that the Amazon rainforest will cease to exist by 2050 at the latest, or that the melting of the polar caps will cause irreversible and ultimately fatal climate change within the next ten to twenty years. Instead, The Economist cheerfully predicted high prices and record profits for commodity firms.
Simply put, regardless of the merits of capitalism (and it does have many—chief among them the unprecedented material, scientific, and standard of living growth of the past two hundred years), it simply will cease to be a viable system quite soon. I agree with Marx—the choices will be socialism or barbarism. Humanity cannot continue to squander its resources on what is profitable rather than what is necessary and useful, lest we soon find ourselves in an uninhabitable planetary graveyard of automobiles and iPods. It is for this admittedly soteriological reason that I have an abiding allegiance to socialism—and I use the word “socialism” deliberately, rather than “Marxism” or “communism,” as all three are very, very different things.
Socialism is economic democracy. Intuitively speaking, it is strange that liberal democracy and free market capitalism have come to be so closely intertwined, since the former is based on the idea that everyone is inherently equal, whereas the latter is based on the idea that those who are more equal will succeed at the expense of everyone else, and that is for the best. I agree with Aristotle’s assessment that democracy and extreme differences between rich and poor cannot coexist; therefore, it is necessary either to limit poverty or to limit democracy. I value democracy higher than virtually any other human creation—higher even that stability or safety, and I have spent a long time living in a country where democracy and extreme economic inequality indeed do not coexist, and in which numerous steps have been taken to limit democracy and entrench poverty. Moreover, it seems to go peculiarly unnoticed that economic decisions governing virtually every aspect of everyone’s lives are not made through democratic mechanisms, with the workers and consumers represented, and this gaping disconnect, as well as the obvious subservience of the institutions of political democracy to the institutions of private capital belies any notion of a functioning “liberal democracy” in the presence of a “free market” system.
Marxism, contrary to the belief of pretty much everybody everywhere, is not a theory of socialism. Marx wrote rarely, vaguely, and reluctantly about what socialism would actually look like—his work was a systematic criticism of the existing system. By contrast, I spend most of my time thinking about policies for a hypothetical government which I probably wouldn’t be a member of and which would be created after a vague revolution that won’t happen in an unspecified country sometime in the future. Marx considered such theorizing to be hopelessly utopian, and while I agree with him that it is largely an exercise in mental masturbation, what can I say? The higher education systems refuse to put out. I do actually disagree with him a bit on that, but that’s another topic for another evening. More importantly, I think he is absolutely correct in his main assessments, though the world has changed a great deal since the 1880s. Much of what he has predicted has not come to pass, but I would argue that is less because of his shortcomings and more because of deliberate action on the part of those in power to take into consideration his predictions and avert their happening. Schumpeter provides an excellent analysis in his "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy" as to why Marxism is best understood as a religion, and I agree with his assessment. I consider myself one of the faithful, I suppose, because I tend to believe Marx is correct where I cannot prove that he is so--like on the labor theory of value, for instance.
Communism, etatism, bureaucratic collectivism, whatever you happen to call it, is not socialism and is not Marxism. This has been analyzed at length and the reasons for it are many and varied, but what I think is key among them is that no Communist nation has ever satisfied the most basic component of Marxism: workers having control over the means of production. And don’t give me that line about the Party being the only representative of the workers and always acting in their best interests. We both know that is not now, nor has it ever been true. I have grown to quite detest Lenin, and I am by no means a Marxist-Leninist, a Marxist-Maoist, a Marxist-Trotskyist…if anything, I may possibly qualify as a Marxist-Trevorist, but only insofar as Marx provides the basic paradigm upon which I intend to build an entirely different structure.
O Trevor, you say, you are as handsome as you are brilliant. But what about heavily regulated Keynsian welfare-state capitalism? Or a mixed economy? Surely you must address these issues, else it will be unclear why you are driven to the extreme of Marx!
To this my reply must be twofold. First of all, I have no faith whatsoever in capitalism, as I have now grown old enough to notice that when everyone pursues their best interests, only a tiny minority actually achieve them. What is in the best interest of the predator is not in the best interest of the prey, nor is the interest of the parasite in the interest of its host. I believe (as I am not yet well enough versed in macroeconomics to fully understand the numerous studies to this effect) that capitalism will always tend towards monopoly. Capitalism must be based on exploitation, however small-scale or well regulated. The rich will always get richer at the expense of the poor who create their wealth. (Incidentally, The Economist was also kind enough to tell me that corporate America’s share of the national income rose from 7% of GDP in 2001 to 13% today, while workers’ real wages have fallen by 4%, even though productivity is up 15%. There’s some Marx for you.) I have no faith in anarchic systems—I consider myself a bit of a offensive structural realist when it comes to IR, and I think it’s the anarchic political system which will prevent humanity from ever achieving lasting peace (not that there’s a viable alternative, mind). Hell, it’s the anarchic interpersonal relationship system which has me here writing about socialism instead of in bed with a blonde Swedish girl.
Secondly, I dispute the idea that the current neoliberal economic structure has anything to do with any kind of free market. It’s a market structured in a very specific way for the benefit of a very specific group, and it doesn’t involve a hell of a lot of competition and consumer choice. It’s about control, and I think it is too deeply entrenched to be modified or regulated.
But I’m not a utopian. I have no illusions about the prospect of violent revolution in a developed nation, let alone a global proletarian revolution. Absolutely never going to happen.
This is why I can only be satisfied by creating an entirely new theoretical structure, which is essentially built around an attempt to unify a decentralized, federalized planned economy with a democratic political mechanism. I intend it to be designed to function even within the confines of the global capitalist system, and to be able to handle disruptions and gradual decreases in supply of certain raw materials. Yugoslavia from 1965-1974 and Branko Horvat’s theories are pretty close to what I mean.
Of course I know the problems of a planned economy. Of course I know about the tendency towards stagnation and underproduction without the presence of a profit incentive. Of course I know about the danger of rampant inflation with full employment. Of course I know about the characteristic poor responsiveness to consumers (in quality, variety, availability), about the bureaucratization of decision making, about the inevitable second and third economies of unregulated private and state exchanges. I know, I know, I know.
I also am developing a new theory of…well, not revolution, exactly, but of how to come to power in a developed nation, but which does not rely on the gradualism and compromise and dilution of social democracy. Maybe I’ll finish it someday. Till then, I suspect I will have to resign myself to one of two lives: either the traditional leftist approach of teaching college in the vain hope of somehow influencing my students and corrupting the minds of thousands to passive-aggressively achieve a socialist utopia, then becoming bitter and disillusioned at my miserable failure, perhaps offering A’s to nubile students in exchange for sexual favors. OR I could work in government, probably in an advisory or analyst capacity to some policymaker, then eventually getting disgusted with their decision to run cars by incinerating babies in little furnaces and resigning, taking to alcoholism, and lapsing over to Option One again.
Whatever the case, I seem to be suddenly structuring my life around the possibility of going to the London School of Economics for either International Relations or International Political Economy. I still harbor strong doubts about getting in (they only accept 5-10% of applicants!), but that would be pretty much the best possible place on Earth to study what I want to study. Had I dreams, hopes, or ambitions, the LSE would figure prominently in them.
Since I have nothing whatsoever to do save for one fairly simple paper, I am about to begin a reading binge of a scope more staggering than anything I have embarked on before. When I got back from New York in the spring, I pounded down a good dozen or so books over the course of the rest of the school year, which I thought was quite an achievement. I still had four classes and two jobs at the time, though…whereas now I have nothing. Nothing! Nothing save a list of forty books I intend to read between now and the end of the first week of November, when my next class starts. I haven’t counted the pages, but total is somewhere in the neighborhood of nine or ten thousand. Mmmmmmm….

And so I leave this obscenely long (but terribly fascinating, wasn’t it?) blog post with a quote by John Dos Passos which I wanted to fit into the last paragraph but thought it would be too interruptive:

The young man walks fast by himself through the crowd that thins into the night streets; feet are tired from hours of walking; eyes greedy for warm curves of faces, answering flicker of eyes, the set of a head, the lift of a shoulder, the way hands spread and clench; blood tingles with wants; mind is a beehive of hopes buzzing and stinging; muscles ache for the knowledge of jobs, for the roadmender's pick and shovel work, the fisherman's knack with a hook when he hauls on the slithery net from the rail of the lurching trawler, the swing of the bridgeman's arm as he slings down the whitehot rivet, the engineer's slow grip wise on the throttle, the dirtfarmer's use of his whole body when, whoaing the mules, he yanks the plow from the furrow. The young man walks by himself searching through the crowd with greedy eyes, greedy ears taut to hear, by himself, alone.
The streets are empty. People have packed into subways, climbed into streetcars and buses; in the stations they've scampered into suburban trains; they've filtered into lodgings and tenements, gone up in elevators into apartment houses. In a show window two sallow window dressers in their shirtsleeves are bringing out a dummy girl in a red evening dress, at a corner welders in masks lean into sheets of blue flame repairing a cartrack, a few drunk bums shamble along, a sad streetwalker fidgets under an arclight. From the river comes the deep rumbling whistle of a steamboat leaving dock. A tug hoots far away.
The young man walks by himself, fast but not fast enough, far but not far enough (faces slide out of sight, talk trails into tattered scraps, footsteps tap fainter in alleys); he must catch the last subway, the streetcar, the bus, run up the gangplanks of all the steamboats, register at all the hotels, work in the cities, answer the want-ads, learn the trades, take up the jobs, live in all the boardinghouses, sleep in all the beds. One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough. At night, head swimming with wants, he walks by himself alone.
No job, no woman, no house, no city.

Back to Bloggery. My routine for the past week and a half has been thus:

I tend to wake up around noon, when someone somewhere in the building takes to playing theme songs from old 16-bit Nintendo games on their electric guitar. Whether this person is in league with the Mystery Bongoer in building seven, I do not yet know. I go about my morning routine, cursing my lack of glasses, and generally have a sandwich for breakfast. By this I do not mean that I usually have a sandwich. I mean that I have a sandwich in a general way. I use the term “sandwich” out of politeness…it consists of three slices of Euroshopper salami with two slices of cheese on two pieces of white Euroshopper bread. I dream of one day finding some money on the ground so I can splurge and buy myself some mayonnaise.
I walk to the Dag Hammarskjöld library, and generally run into two or three people I know on the way. They ask me where I’m going and what I’m doing and I usually tell them I’m working on a paper, which is more or less true.
I love the Dag library sufficiently that I feel it and I are on a first name basis now. I have staked out a spot at one of the tables on the second floor where I can look out the window at the little clumps of attractive blondes and scraggly European guys who sit in the sculpted courtyard. I’ve just about finished my initial reconnaissance of the stacks: I have my lengthy list of books, and I intend to get at least halfway through it before I start to fill it back up again. Several of them are in closed stacks hidden away somewhere in Dag’s nether regions. I have ordered so many of these that they’ve given me a copy of the request form so I can make my own photocopies and not use up theirs. It is endlessly entertaining to me that everywhere I go, I place demands on the library systems which are so rigorous that they inevitably lead to the invention of entirely new rules. It is as though they must take new stock of their lives and their assumptions about the world after encountering the massive girth of my intellect.
If there’s a new Economist, I start with that. Sometimes I browse the other political science/policy/international relations journals, then I tend to finish off what I started reading the day before. I give myself about three hours for this, then I head out across the river to the little place behind the Engelska Parken where you can get coffee in a cardboard cup for five kroner. That’s pretty much the cheapest coffee in Sweden (today I met someone at Ofvandahl’s and it was 23 kr!) although it has those scummy rainbows reflected in it, sort of like motor oil on a rainy highway.
The coffee gets me sufficiently energized to tear through a few hundred pages of IR theory, structures of planned economies, policy reviews, and the like. I have commented before that it’s rather difficult to teach yourself something like macroeconomics, since all of the books economists write are intended for other economists and don’t care in the slightest if anyone else can find them intelligible. I like to think I’m making good progress.
I usually leave the library well after dark. The ICA in Flogsta closes at 11, so I have to make sure I get there in time to buy a 19 kroner ICA pizza for my dinner. Thus, I leave the library around 10 and make the long, dark, windy walk back, usually muttering to myself.
Ah, I hear you all saying. Now that sounds like the Trevor we know.
I like to watch a movie or a couple episodes of “House” while I eat my capricciola pizza, then I have a couple IM conversations with colleagues and friends, and usually get another hour or so of reading in before bed at 2:00-ish. In this manner, I spend about eight hours a day reading international relations, history, political theory, or economics and I’ve been getting through about four or five hundred pages a day of fairly dense stuff. My notebook is filling at an alarming rate.
Dag’s comprehensiveness has allowed me a new luxury. Previously when I have taught myself things, I tend to progress in a disjointed, non-chronological order which leaves surprising gaps in my knowledge base. Here, if I want to give myself an impromptu course on the thought and theory of Kenneth N. Waltz, I can do so in chronological order, and read not only his four major works, but also his articles and the articles of his critics. It’s fantastic. Ideally by the time I return home I will have become such an intellectual juggernaut that my cerebrum will have developed its own gravitational field, which will help me to not lose my glasses so much.

Sarah came by yesterday evening, drunk and wanting to fight and screw. I have no time or patience left for her, but I was nonetheless suckerpunched by the memories of laying with her at just the right time when the light from the opposite building filtered in through her blinds into the dark room, cutting us into stark pieces on the bed, etching the curls of the smoke from her bummed cigarettes into nebulous bas-relief. It was like making love in a Richard Stark novel, and I readily admit to missing it, that brittle noirishness, as I believe it was more honest about its lies than most such experiences ever are.
I’m not good at being friends after a breakup, though, however uncommitted the relationship was. There are always awkward lunches or coffees insisted upon, and I do not handle them the way I am apparently supposed to; I become a sort of uncompromising Grant at a coffee-table Appomattox, unwilling to accept anything short of unconditional surrender. I tend to answer their policy shift from the uncaring selfishness of the breakup to the lets-still-be-friends vulnerability with becoming my most cold and unimpressed, breaking them apart by telling them truths. It’s a bad habit, and I’m actively trying to avoid it here.
I let her talk for an hour or so, then walked her home. She asked if I wanted to come up and I told her I didn’t, which was true. I was in the middle of Campbell Craig’s “Glimmer of a New Leviathan,” and it was honestly much more interesting.

This is how my political career would go:

From the BBC:

"The prime minister watched his downfall on television from a hotel in New York after his speech was cancelled..."

In a hopeless effort to convince you heathens that I'm not just spending all my time out here drunk and trying to screw every girl in Europe, I'm going to start ending my blog posts with a list of what I'm currently reading. I'm sure at least three of you will find it captivating.

Campbell Craig, "Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz"
William J. Duiker, "Ho Chi Minh"
Andrew K. Hanami, et al, "Perspectives on Structural Realism."

Vatican Damage Control

The headlines on FOX News always strike me as great names for rock bands. I would buy every CD ever produced by a group called "Vatican Damage Control."

The weather has grown ingratiating, as though it were being played by Jack Lemmon in "Glengarry Glen Ross." It gets paradoxically quite cold sometimes--not necessarily at night, but rather just at random in intervals during a beautiful sunny day. I sat in the kitchen/living area estuary yesterday afternoon, watching the sun bleed down the face of building 7. Emma was chasing Benny around with a cigarette lighter. They're always falling out and trying to set one another on fire.
"We're all broken people," Robert said suddenly. He was shirtless, and he has a tattoo of the ace of spades over his heart. He was drinking the coffee I'd made that morning.

The Japanese party was a bust. It's gotten too cold at night for rooftop parties that aren't themed around nude snow-angels or ski bunny apparel. I spent some time talking to Klaus, Martin's friend, who is the Long-Screamer Guy.
Ah, it occurs to me I haven't explained the Flogsta Scream here as of yet. It's fairly straightforward--at 10:00 every night, all of the doors and windows in Flogsta fly open. People pour out onto balconies, and the buildings shake with the rhythm of feet running for exterior openings. And then the 2500-odd students in Flogsta scream their heads off. When I first moved here, it was pretty much just me and one other guy somewhere far away going "Ahhhhheehhhhhhhhscrew it." Now it goes on for a solid five minutes or more, due to two people. One is Emma--she who is known as The Pause Screamer. You see, at first everyone screams at once, then there's a beat while they all take a breath or decide whether or not to go back to watching football or screwing squidgy guys or what have you. And in that silence, Emma screams, alone.
Well, then everybody just has to scream back. And so it goes.
Klaus has a more Teutonic approach. His lung power is matched only by his rather peculiar haircut, and he is able to bellow for lengths of time previously reserved for water buffalo. The first time he demonstrated this, there was widespread applause from the constituency of Flogsta.
Anyway. I talked with him a while, and bumped into Duncan, who is a small redheaded Brit from Essex and who seems to wear cricket sweaters everywhere. He is one half of what I can only assume is a superhero/crimefighting duo--the other half is Jim, a big mohawked American. This was the first time I'd seen Duncan without Jim, and it struck me as mildly alarming, like seeing Dick Cheney in a clown suit.
We decided it was too cold up there so we left, our pockets full of nikujyaga. The Europeans promptly vanished, the way they always do when the going gets rough, and I wandered alone over to building 8, where I expected to find Piotr at his Pimps n' Hoes party, doing lines of coke off a hooker's ass or something. Instead I found four fat Hungarians playing Scrabble. I'd heard vague rumors about a good party at Varmlands nation...and "Varmlands" sounds kind of like "Warm lands," which seemed like a good plan right around then.
Unfortunately, the only other time I'd been to Varmlands was during the pub crawl. It was eighth or ninth, and my memory was hazy to say the least. But the bus pulled up to the Flogsta stop just as I passed it, and I took that as a sign from Bacchus that I was meant to find Varmlands, for good or for ill.
Of course, it took me an hour and a half of wandering Uppsala, drifting hopelessly into various nations and asking them where the hell Varmlands was. They each gave me wildly conflicting directions, many of which involved navigation based on the cathedral, which is great, except that you can't see it in the dark. I tried navigating by the stars, but I guess they're different here. Maybe it's the metric system.
At any rate, after forty days and forty nights of wandering the chilly Uppsalan desert, I crossed into the land of the Macabees, who reside in a place alarmingly called "Stabby." See photo. I found two Scots there who were looking for cigarettes. I was able to persuade them that the only smokes in town were at Varmlands, so they gladly showed me the way.
Varmlands was a party, like many others, except this one happened to be full of two hundred young nurses celebrating some sort of nursy thing. The night progressed and Europeans danced to cheesy disco, and I found Duncan and Jim and some people they knew. One of these newcomers was a profane Canadian with a distinctive Ulster accent. He and Jim got into a shouting match over the merits of Jerry Rice, exchanging the sort of insults the drill sergeant in "Full Metal Jacket" was good at thinking up. That was all well and entertaining until the Canadian said, "Well, at least we aren't getting our asses beat by Iraqis!"
Now, what I and Duncan and probably everybody but that Canadian knew was that Jim had lost a brother in Iraq. Maybe the Canadian did know. Whatever the case, Jim went over the table at him, Guinni flying, chairs overturning, and was punching the guy on the ground. The Canandian seemed to be trying to get his thumbs in Jim's eyes without success. Women made half-hearted screaming noises, drunken European guys looked at each other and tried to figure out what to do, and I, in the spirit of liberty, equality, and fraternity, hit Jim with a chair.
I was sort of expecting it to break apart and be all dramatic like in the movies. It was just a metal folding chair, though, so it just went Blaaang and bounced back up in the air. It was enough to shake Jim out of his punch-the-Canadian policy, though, and when he stood up to punch me instead, a bunch of guys were able to grab him and drag him out.
Security wanted to talk to us, of course, so the Canadian wiped the blood off his nose and pretended to speak only French. We got kicked out anyway, so we wandered to the Stora Torget where there's an Irish pub that's open till two in the morning. I bought the Canadian a Guinness and he started to explain how he hadn't meant anything by it, and he wasn't the one who'd sent Jim's brother to die, and the war never had to happen and so forth.
Which I thought brought up an interesting point. A strong argument could be (and has been) made that the war shouldn't have happened, but whether it had to happen is another idea entirely. I think it did have to happen. I think that oil had to be grabbed before the peak hits. I think bases had to be pulled out of Saudi Arabia before they sparked a civil war. I think Eisenhower's military-industrial complex and the Carlyle Group needed 87 billion dollars of defense spending. I think America had to have a war. I think it was decided years ago that the war had to happen, and even if the circumstances which made it necessary did not exist then, they have since been created. Does that make it excusable? Of course not. Any less morally, ethically, and legally repugnant? Not in the slightest. It's matter of degrees of causality. No, those thousands of people in Iraq didn't have to die for me...but they did have to die for General Electric and United Defense and Halliburton and Kellogg, Brown, and Root, and a thousand other corporations with a thousand other board members.
Anyway. We parted ways and I found Ashley and an Aussie named Sebastian. I rode on the back of Sebastian's bike halfway home, but it was cold and beastly uncomfortable, so I took to shouting abuse at him until he finally got fed up and made me get off. They both biked away, and I was left (rightly) to walk the rest of the way home. I stopped to pee on a tree and met a Frenchman who was lost. I helped him find his way back to Flogsta and stumbled home to have lengthy MSN conversations and to read a few chapters of a long biography of Ho Chi Minh.

Now the headline reads, "Low Grade Tuna." It never fails!

An Insufficient Degree of Cheese

What with my glasses stolen, my razor broken, and my keycard not opening the laundry room, I find myself growing increasingly dishevelled of late. That I have class for a total of three hours this week (tomorrow at about 3 in the afternoon) hasn't helped this downward slide along the presentability bell curve. I tend to stay up late watching House (I could watch a smart guy be mean to sick people forever), then sleep till noon or so, when I push unwilling three-dollar-a-kilo Euroshopper coffee down my throat for a while till it occurs to me that I have absolutely nowhere to go all day and nothing to do once I don't get there. This is not a recipe for producing a suave, debonair citizen of the world.
However, the weather has been disgustingly spectacular all week and it has driven me out into town yesterday and today to sit on a bench beneath the cathedral, where I read A.J.P. Taylor's "Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918." I keep meaning to go check out the gym nearby, but I keep not doing it...mainly because I don't think I'll be able to justify spending fifty bucks a month on a membership.
In fact, I have a hard enough time justifying spending money on food. Doubtless a few of my faithful readers will greet this with a certain degree of concern and consternation, but I assure you, I do eat every day. Malcolm X lived on one meal a day and a lot of coffee and banana splits, and I tend to consume more than that. Like Hemingway wrote, I've found that hunger gives life a certain edge it otherwise lacks; I tend to feel intellectually sharper, more alert, more receptive to the various sensory inputs which inundate us over the course of our otherwise mundane lives. That's probably because my brain isn't getting the chemicals it needs, but nevermind. I'd rather eat once a day and have enough money left to travel rather than sit around in Flogsta, stuffing fried meat into myself.
Of course, clever as I am, this frugality is self-perpetuating. You see, if you eat little and have a freakishly fast metabolism, liquor tends to hit you a lot faster. Sure, manly sorts may scoff at you for being a "lightweight," but I then explain patiently to such people that it may take them three times as long to get drunk, but that means I can get drunk three times as often or stay drunk three times as long, and therefore am making a much more efficient and effective use of my time and money. I then offer them my condolences. It's a big hit at parties.
Anyhow. Tomorrow there's a Japanese-themed party on top of building 2, which I plan to attend. The Nihonjin love me, because I know a few primitive sentences in their godawful demon language, so I'm likely to get free food. Then Piotr's having a party in building 8, which has a "Pimps 'n Hoes" theme. Expect photographic corroboration of this claim.
Ashley (she of the tattooed derriere) is being deported, so I don't have anyone to watch movies with anymore. Emma says she's going to download a classic Swedish porn movie (which involves a lot of sausage) for us all to watch...and exciting and cultural as that sounds, I fear it may represent a high point in my life which will never again be attained.

Actual Reflections on Sweden

I was just watching the Swedish election debates and it occured to me that I haven't actually posted much about Sweden and the Swedes themselves. Thought I'd rectify that situation.
To begin with, the debate between the Prime Minister and the conservative leader of the opposition was a fairly illuminating glimpse into how actual democracy works. Amazing to watch two guys with actually different policies (gasp!) having a civil, rational discussion about the economy and the environment, rather than our system in which two multimillionaires stand around saying, "Well, I think we should grind up all babies and print money on their skins," while the other guy says, "That's crazy! We should also grind up old people, the infirm, and homosexuals!"

It's become clear that I live in a fairly exceptional corridor. I'm told the Swedes have a well-deserved reputation for being standoffish and brusque, but the people I live with are as outgoing as they are logically imbalanced. Ten of them are Swedish, from various parts of the country, and they are all entertaining, interesting, well educated, polylingual, atheistic, and attractive. Except for Rikard, who is kind of strange-looking. The other Swedes I've encountered have proven to be friendly, though in a vaguely fatalistic way, and they seem to universally speak fantastic English. They also have all proven to be well-travelled, and ethnocentric without being patriotic. They are proud of their country and can list any number of famous and important Swedes, but I have yet to meet a single Swede who thinks the Swedish system actually works.

A few things really slay me about this place. They all always stop for pedestrians--apparently, there's a law that they have to do so. They love to sing drinking songs. They don't stand in line; you have to find a little ticket machine (this process is something of a national sport), which is always cleverly hidden behind a potted plant or an old woman or something, and then you just mill about aimlessly, not talking to anyone, till your number is called. They get very excited about crayfish parties (kräftskiva) at the end of the summer, although none of them actually seem to like to eat crayfish.

This, incidentally, was the reason for the apocalyptic party we had Friday night.

I think the pictures below convey the evening better than any story of mine ever could. Suffice it to say there was a knife fight, and we made the papers. I'll try to get a picture of it or a link, though it'll be in Swedish when/if I do. (Edit: the article is here.) There was a certain degree of happenstance involving Imperial Russian stout, Czech absinthe, and Swedish vodka, and now I think Martin hates me because of a certain liaison with a certain Finnish girl I guess he liked. Also, I think someone stole my glasses. The 2:00 PM breakfast of hot pizza eaten in the cold wind on the terrace outside pizza/kebab joint across from ICA where we all sat around, stunned and still drunk, our eyes glazed and our jaws slack, was one of the most purely existential moments I can remember.

Anyhow. I'm ending this with a link to a Facebook album with pictures of some of my corridor-mates, so you people know who the hell I'm talking about. I'll give you a brief once-over to bring you up to speed.

Dramatis Personae
Benny- I've mentioned before. He's a second-year law student who once served in the Swedish military and was elected platoon representative. Yeah, apparently here, the soldiers elect their leaders and only do what their told if they can reach an agreement with the officers that's to their liking. I guess this works if the last war you fought was in 1814. He and I used to sit around and talk politics for four or five hours a day, but he's been rather standoffish lately. He has a girl named Myckes (I think) who comes over and lives in his room every weekend, whether he's home or not. She assures me they aren't a couple, which I think is grand, as she is arguably the hottest person anywhere in the world. There's a picture of her in there, but she's actually in mid-sneeze, so it's the least flattering picture of her possible. This is to prevent breaking the Internet.
Tove- is very athletic. She's absurdly attractive, though instead of curving outward at her hips, actually seems to get skinnier. She sort of tapers from her shoulders down to the point of her feet, leaving her with the scrawniest hips of anyone I've ever seen. She has strange, tattooed, drunken friends and she loves nothing more than to sing a drinking song called "Bordeaux, Bordeaux."
Hannah- I know nothing about. She cooks good tacos, is friends with Tove, and has cleavage you could swim in.
Robert and Rikard- Robert I've mentioned before, I believe. He's the one who took the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, then hitchhiked to Beijing, Ho Chi Minh City, and finally Bangkok. He's got a great story about blacking out and getting robbed by a gang of elderly, toothless whores in Ho Chi Minh City. He's friends with Rikard, who has reason to believe he may in fact be black. Rikard also has obscenely rich parents, which is why he has a weed connection, a big plasma-screen TV, and twenty-eight pairs of shoes. And he's pretty much the worst cook in the world.
Emma- is crazy. When I first met her, she was balancing two inches of ash on the end of her cigarette, was scratching her ass with one hand and gesturing with a bottle in the other. She said, "I'm not athletic like Tove, I just smoke and drink beer." She loves Bill Hicks and Queen and is pretty far to the left without knowing many of the particulars of it. She's fucking a Dutchman in the next corridor, which is too bad.
Mohammad- I tried to get a picture of the little guy, but he's a goddamn ninja. He just appears, silently, eats cream cheese, and vanishes again from whence he came. He could be here right now and I wouldn't know.
Martin- eats birdseed, and that's all I know.
Kristina- is great looking from the neck down, but goddamn hideous everywhere else. She's some kind of physics/math double major, and doesn't actually like talking to "people." I'm told she's easier than a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, but she's been pretty standoffish to me.
Julia- is the other exchange student. She's from somewhere in The Netherlands with a lot of guttural consonants. I know that really narrows it down. She's 21, got her Bachelor's already, and is in the midst of her Masters in law. She wants to be a corporate tax lawyer and has a squidgy boyfriend, which is too bad, because she's goddamn gorgeous.

Otherwise, little else to report here just now. Pictures here.

We had a party

Updates

Just three things.

1. I know a scraggly inebriated Irishman named "Lutheran Caine," which might possibly be the greatest comic-book villian name ever. We call him "Loufer," for short, mostly because he is too drunk and too Irish to enunciate the "t" properly.

2. Sarah called things off a couple days ago, while we were walking back from failing the Swedish exam. I'm moderately annoyed and expect a certain degree of awkwardness to ensue. Hoping the next girl is empty-headed and big-breasted, so I don't feel like there's much of a loss when things go sour.

3. Found these things at ICA which are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike frozen pizzas. They're 19 kroner and now I live on them. I expect to die shortly.